“Behind every successful man is a woman,” runs the Turkish variant of the famous saying.1 In politics, there is no lack of recognition for the enabling role played by a loyal wife in her husband’s political career; indirectly, though this “wisdom” can be used to delegitimize women’s demands for political representation, since they are presumably present through their husbands. If turned around, the same proverb acquires a very different connotation: “Behind every successful woman is a man.” This inversion suggests that women in politics lack proper agency and are proxies of men. Feminist research on language and gender has shown the impact that such gendered features of language have on the social order (Bucholtz 2014). The shift of the saying from a positive meaning when the woman was in the background to a rather disempowering one when the woman is in the foreground reveals which form of femininity is socially more acceptable and signals the constraints placed on women’s political agency by the social order.
In Turkey, discriminatory mechanisms of a social and political nature result in particularly low levels of female representation. While the complete gendered statistics for the March 2019 local election were still not available at the time of delivery of this manuscript, the numbers from 2014 are illustrative of the scale of women’s exclusion from—in particular local—politics. Between 2014 and 2019, women accounted for 10.72% of municipal councilors and less than 3% of mayors (Kadın Koalisyonu 2014). Women’s exclusion from local politics becomes even more apparent when these figures are compared to their parliamentary equivalents. After the 2018 election, women accounted for 17.3% of deputies (TBMM 2019), which is clearly higher than the corresponding percentage of municipal councilors. Ayten Alkan has labeled this situation, which has been visible in statistics since at least 1999, the “Turkish paradox” (2009).
1.1 What Is It About Local Politics in Turkey that Makes It Particularly Inaccessible to Women?
Local Power and Female Political Pathways in Turkey aims to uncover the reasons behind women’s local underrepresentation by building upon 200 in-depth interviews conducted with past and present female mayors, municipal councilors, representatives of women’s branches, and local NGOs. The “Turkish paradox” constitutes the initial puzzle that propelled me to engage in the qualitative analysis of profiles, political pathways and experiences of female local politicians that constitutes the core of this book. My assessment provides a “situated” answer to the question of what makes local politics so inaccessible to women. The answer is “situated” on three levels: temporally, because it stems from local political equilibria in place during the study; spatially, because it is anchored in local realities specific to three different cities; and politically, because it distinguishes between the specific contexts of the four major political parties.
But Turkey’s case is notable for at least three more characteristic features, which make this book’s exposure of discriminatory mechanisms in politics even more timely. First, the long-serving governmental force, the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), has managed to organize women in particularly extensive and active women’s branches. According to official party estimates, these women’s branches have over 4.5 million members (Selva Çam 2018). They are said to be the largest women’s organization in the world. The branches work tirelessly for the AKP’s reelection, conducting a permanent electoral campaign. They are also very influential because they distribute social benefits, charitable as well as state-sponsored, ensuring the electoral support of underprivileged social groups for the current government. However, this large-scale grassroots activism doesn’t translate into an electoral presence and few women manage to climb the party ladder.
Second, the gendered panorama of Turkish municipal politics has been transformed and disrupted by the pro-Kurdish political parties. Since 1999, when the parties won major municipal offices in the Kurdish-populated southeast region, they have had the most favorable statistics with regard to the proportion of elected women. This is not only due to the application of the gendered quota on local offices but also thanks to the introduction of the (de facto illegal) co-mayorship system in 2014, which meant that the one hundred municipalities won by the party were jointly presided over by a man and a woman. Notwithstanding the removal of pro-Kurdish co-mayors since 2016, the party kept the co-mayorship system in place for the 2019 municipal ballot and still has the highest level of female representation in the country. The gap between the pro-Kurdish parties and other political forces in Turkey in terms of women’s representation keeps opening which propels observers to treat the former as an anomaly. In contrast, I analyze these parties as an integral part of Turkey’s political spectrum while still recognizing the contentious character of their political activity.
Third, women involved in local politics in Turkey are associated with numerous stereotypical images: they are seen as proxies of men, as lacking political experience and as being less qualified to exercise a mandate requiring technical knowledge. Compared with female parliamentarians, women in municipal councils are also deemed to be less educated and they are more often lacking in professional standing—more likely to be the ev hanımı, the housewife. Some of these ideas were validated by earlier academic research (Tekeli 1981; Arat 1985; Güneş Ayata 1998) and need to be taken seriously and examined. Even though they may not capture the contemporary situation, they still survive in the form of perceptions related to women in local politics. Thus, the aim of this study is to build upon existing research about Turkey and to underline persistent features as well as significant developments in women’s municipal representation.
1.2 Women’s Status and Political Representation in Contemporary Turkey
Women’s political representation is connected both to women’s status in contemporary Turkey and to the country’s overall political context. This segment provides some elements of the bigger picture. It shows, among other things, that women’s political representation can grow in parallel with the growth of authoritarian rule and that there is no automatic link between democracy and the proportion of women in electoral politics.
The gendered order and the balance sheet of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2002 until today has been the object of abundant research. For Deniz Kandiyoti, gender is the key pillar of the AKP’s discourse (2016, 105). The party’s policies pertaining to women are grounded in religion, nationalism, and neoliberalism (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu 2011, 557; Coşar and Özkan-Kerestecioğlu 2017, 2). Pınar Parmaksız considers them to be a continuation of the paternalist logic of the Kemalist regime (2016, 40). Women are conceived primarily not as individuals but as cornerstones of the institution of the family (Insel 2003, 304). This is why they are key for the social policies of Turkey’s conservative government: they are, for instance, official receivers of social help for low income families (Güneş Ayata and Tütüncü 2008b, 371). In its first years in government, the AKP continued with a reformist approach to gender equality: in line with the previously amended Civil Code, the party spearheaded the remaking of the Penal Code with the (not always smooth) involvement of women’s organizations. Turkey also signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a key legal instrument—especially in the fight to end violence against women.
The AKP’s policies are not without ambiguities. At the same moment the party incorporated the principle of gender equality into the Constitution, it also proposed criminalizing adultery (Ilkkaracan 2016, 41). In 2012, the party proposed banning abortion (Negrón-Gonzales 2016). While the proposal didn’t concretize into a law, abortion became less accessible in public hospitals across the country, impacting low income and less mobile women in particular. In the light of the abortion debate, the question arose whether women’s status is used by the government to divert attention from other events—in this case, the bombing of a group of young smugglers on the Turkish border by the army, which led to the deaths of 34 people and is known as the Roboski/Uludere massacre (Kılıçdağı 2012).
However, the watchword for the AKP’s perspective on women’s issues is conservatism. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the founder of the AKP and the president of Turkey since 2014, has declared on multiple occasions that he doesn’t believe in the equality of women and men (BBC Türkçe 2014). He associated abortion with murder and, more recently, has attacked the practice of marriage after 30 and delayed child-rearing (T24 2020). In line with the AKP’s conservative political positions, muftis obtained the right to officiate marriage ceremonies without also having to contract civilian marriages (CNN Türk 2017a). The parliamentary commission on family unity proposed several measures, including limiting women’s right to alimony, in order to discourage divorce (Tahaoğlu 2016).
The Global Gender Gap Report ranks Turkey 130 among 153 countries in terms of gender equality (WE Forum 2019), an overall drop of 25 places since 2006. In sub-indexes, Turkey ranks better for political empowerment (109/153) while its worst ranking is in the category of women’s economic participation and opportunity (136/153).2 In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Turkey’s standing is higher: it ranks fifth among nineteen countries, and is only outperformed by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Ku...