Abstract The article will suggest a bottom-up approach to analyzing the impact of European Union (EU) conditionality on candidate countries. If requiring comprehensive reforms, EU accession negotiations offer domestic actors a legitimacy standard, external constraints and a focal point for electoral coalitions as resources in the domestic political arena. The Turkish case serves as a hypothesis-generating case study suggesting that domestic actors who are disadvantaged in domestic resources in these dimensions embrace EU accession, whereas domestic actors who feel threatened in their domestic resources adopt an opposite strategy. It will be demonstrated that the two major Turkish political parties adopted a cost–benefit calculus in their position towards EU accession. The Turkish case is particularly intriguing because the positions adopted by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP), respectively, have been counter-intuitive, and in fact both parties have drastically reversed earlier positions towards EU accession and done so in disregard of the preferences of their core electorate.