Our university’s Faculty of Political Sciences, Political Science and Public Administration Department member Dr. Burcu TAŞKIN’s article “Political Representation of Women in Turkey: Institutional Opportunities versus Cultural Constraints”, which examines the effects of political institutions and polarization on women’s political representation in Turkey, was published in Open Gender Journal.
The study, presented during the 10th European Feminist Research Conference (EFRC) held in 2018, was selected for publication in Open Gender, the academic journal of the ATGENDER institution, which organized the conference. In this article, TAŞKIN analyzed both the descriptive and substantive aspects of women’s representation in Turkey.
In the study it was first mentioned that the women’s empowerment was first discussed in the 1980s, while the 1990s provided the foundations for transforming power relations and economic, social, and political structures for gender equality. TAŞKIN then briefly analyzed female politicians since the Republican period and stated that the rising wave of feminism in the 1990s increased the participation of women in political life.
She claimed that although the proportion of female politicians in the Turkish Parliament has increased from only 4% in 1999 to 17.6% in the 2018 general elections, this increase was not reflected in the effectiveness of women deputies in Turkey. This article basically argued that as electoral competition increases, female candidates’ chances of being elected decrease and causes women’s underrepresentation. On the other hand, it is stated that as the distribution of seats among the parties increases, this situation positively affects the representation of women. The author underlined that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, women’s movements and grassroots women’s rights demands that coincided with the highly welcomed EU accession process in Turkey offered these institutional opportunities to promote women’s representation and break traditional patron-client relations. In general, however, it is stated that cultural constraints such as high polarization between parties and the clash of Islamist and European values prevent female MPs from cooperating on policies related to women, and strict party discipline reduces the parliamentary effectiveness of Turkish female politicians.
From the department introduction:
“Taşkın has been looking at the parliamentary influence of women in Turkey since 1999. He observes how the political influence of women in terms of doing important work, despite the fact that women’s representation in parliament in general elections has increased from 4% (1999) to 15% (2015). The study suggests that parliamentary work, such as the discussion of women’s or feminist issues, has been reduced. Her analysis empirically demonstrates the changes brought about by institutional and local factors in parliamentary representation and effectiveness”.
Taşkın, Burcu (2021): Political Representation of Women in Turkey. Institutional Opportunities versus Cultural Constraints. In: Open Gender Journal (2021). doi: 10.17169/ogj.2021.106