Since 2003, the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) has transformed what is often referred to as Turkey’s “old,” “corporatist,” and “populist” welfare system into a synthesis of Islamic conservatism and neoliberalism. In that sense, JDP closely follows the global trends in social policy practices: moving from traditional welfare state through decentralization and enabling a key role for non-governmental organizations such as faith-based civil society organizations. This research evaluates the outcome of the transformation in social policy and its potential implications for both social protection and politics by analyzing Household Budget Survey micro-data between 2003 and 2016. The data allow us to identify social classes and analyze various social protection transfers by social class and gender at the individual level. The results suggest that the JDP’s social policy practices reduce social protection to a mere management of a risk (i.e., poverty) or a safety net measure, for the poorest of the poor. Although welfare transfers are small in size at the aggregate level, they have significant implications with respect to social classes and genders. For example, while non-working population of which majority are housewives, unpaid family workers, unemployed, and retirees are increasingly becoming the dependent of such transfers, the new type of policy has widened the gap between men and women when it comes to their level of dependency on welfare transfers. JDP’s policies do not seem to be efficient in terms of mitigating poverty let alone eradication of it. On the contrary, they raise concerns about equity and dependency on welfare transfers. As repeatedly pointed out in the literature, JDP’s practice of social policy paves the way for building a clientelist relationship between the party and the recipients in the short run, and for a social engineering practice to create a new conservative society that is disciplined by poverty.