The Democratic Party was Turkey’s first governing party elected in open, competitive national elections, as such it has been a point of reference for Turkish leaders seeking to present themselves as defenders of democracy in the decades since. In retrospect, the party is presented as allowing greater religious expression in public life and pursuing liberal economic policies. Yet a striking aspect of the Democratic Party was the degree to which, in its own time, the party’s greater meaning was already subject for debate. Even as Democratic Party leaders were deciding on their policies and maneuvering for political advantage, social scientists in Turkey and around the world were debating its significance. The way the party is remembered, therefore, is less a product of retrospective analysis than it is a result of active shaping by Democratic Party leaders and a host of contemporary commentators who hoped to hold up the party as emblematic of their larger theories about democracy and modernization. The image we have of the party today is as much a result of 1950s wishful thinking as it is of reality. This paper considers the discussions surrounding the Democratic Party that occurred among social scientists in the 1950s in order to better understand how national political struggles, rooted in domestic political concerns, can be taken up by social scientists and presented as symbols of some larger truth—in this case modernization theory. Whatever the reality of the Democratic Party and its leaders, Turkey’s transition to liberal democracy was essential for asserting that a particular type of political development was possible in “non-Western” countries. It is important, therefore, that we disentangle what the Democratic Party was from what many analysts wanted it to be, and understand how those distinctions became so muddled.