The political representation of Kurdish, Kemalist, and conservative Muslim women in Turkey (1990-2010)

2011-11-17The underrepresentation of women in political decision making and their weak substantive representation continue in Turkey as of 2011. The dissertation examines the timing, direction, and mechanisms of slight changes in the representation of three women’s groups in Turkey, namely Kurdish, conservative Muslim, and Kemalist women, between 1990 and 2010. It seeks to answer two primary questions: why was there a change in Kurdish and conservative Muslim women’s political representation in the parliamentary offices and parties’ decision-making organs between 1990 and 2010, while there was almost no change in the representation of Kemalist women; and why did the change occur at different rates for Kurdish and conservative Muslim women. ❧ This dissertation draws on political intersectionality, women and politics literature, and studies on women’s political activism in Turkey to suggest that identity-based explanations, organization-based explanations, and elite-based explanations are helpful in understanding the changes in the representation of women from multiply subordinated groups, as well as the observed variations in these changes. More specifically, three factors extracted from these sets of explanations: mobilization via intersecting identities; the efforts of women’s organizations; and the support of male leaders must, this study suggests, be present for a significant change in representation to occur. ❧ Three main conclusions emerge from this study. First, the ethnic and religious identities of Kurdish and conservative Muslim women are important components in both their political activism and representation. Second, intra-party organizations provide not only the space for women to become active in political parties and opportunities to demand further representation and present these demands to the party leadership. Third, political leaders tend to take women’s demands into consideration if they perceive a need to promote women, regardless of these leaders’ and parties’ ideologies or attitudes about women’s political role. ❧ This dissertation recommends that the scope of literature on women’s representation should be broadened by systematically examining relationships between different actors and the institutional context. It also suggests that given the dearth of studies based outside the U.S. and Western Europe, data collection at the subnational and party levels in other contexts is important to enrich theories related to the gender and politics. The contribution of the dissertation is broadly applicable to fields of women’s political representation, political change, party politics, political intersectionality, and Turkish politics