Words by Kieu An Nguyen
Turkish society was considered unfavorable to women due to the sharp differentiation between the private and the public; children, the sick, and the elderly were cared for as unpaid work in the home; and violence against women and children was seen as a private matter (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008a). According to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report released by the World Economic Forum, Turkey ranks 130th out of 149 countries in terms of the gender gap in political representation and ranks lowest on gender equality among the countries that are its peers in the high human development group (Uysal, Akgül, Köksal & Alemdar, 2020). Interestingly, in the 1990s, Turkish women seemed to have participated in politics more actively than before, when the women’s movement initiated various campaigns that initially targeted the private sphere due to rapid modernization and the eradication of the patriarchal, traditional social structure (Keskin, 1997). However, although the number of women in the Turkish parliament increased from only 4% in 1999 to a high of 17.6% in the 2018 general election, this has not reflected on the effectiveness of including female Members of Parliament (MPs) since they remain as “vote gatherers” rather than “decision-makers” (Taşkın, 2021).
Why have Turkish women parliamentarians not utilized their positions to collaborate on women’s empowerment issues despite the presence of a strong women’s movement throughout Turkey’s history?
This article aims to argue that the underlying causes hindering effective cooperation among Turkish women parliamentarians to ‘act for women’ are socio-cultural and political constraints, reflected through strict intra-party discipline, deep Islamist-secularist divisions, and assigned traditional roles, all of which have complicated quantitative and qualitative equality in representation in the political arena. The key issue is not how many women are MPs, but rather what women parliamentarians do to advance women’s well-being and gender equality. By locating the issue in Turkey’s historical and contemporary contexts, this article will examine the intricate web of sociopolitical factors that have shaped and influenced the dynamics of women’s empowerment within the Turkish parliamentary landscape.
Rise and challenges
According to Çaha (2013), since the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923, laicism – the elimination of religion from the political sphere, has been one of the key principles that informed Kemalism, the founding ideology of the Republic. Women’s political participation was fostered as a symbol of the Kemalist project:
“Women were crucial in the reinvention of the national culture in which women had been considered equal to men among the pre-Islamic Turks in Central Asia and efforts to improve women’s status were used as a means to cultivate Turkish nationalism and adopt Western notions of equality and secularity”
Arat, 2000
Through the legacy of Kemalist “state feminism” and the rise of Western feminist activism, women’s grassroots movements in Turkey have complemented these institutional opportunities to foster women’s representation (Taşkın, 2021). Not to mention, Turkey’s integration into the EU—with its requirement for a crucial reconfiguration of the state and legal structures has led even the most conservative parties to be unable to resist the demands of the women’s movement (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008a). A notable achievement is the revisions of the Civil Code wherein the women’s movement worked together with women MPs and strategic male partners in parliament to create a woman-friendly Civil Code in 2002 (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008b).
However, Taşkın (2021) highlights that their representation is largely ineffective as they fail to address women’s issues, such as protecting women’s rights, preventing violence against women, providing support for childcare, or addressing the exploitation of domestic labor – measures that would empower women in economic and social life. Some women MPs are even acting against existing women’s rights on the basis that Turkish men have allegedly been disadvantaged by the ban on early marriage or indefinite alimony. After the creation of a gender-based agenda during the Civil Code amendment, although EU authorities pressured the government to bring about a more egalitarian Penal Code in 2004, without an effective intra-parliamentary effort, there could not be a removal of all statements that discriminated against women (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008b).
Moreover, while the women’s movement was able to create a gender-based agenda during the Civil Code amendment, it was unable to disseminate the idea of the Penal Code being as important as the Civil Code for gender equality (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008b). Hence, despite having the highest level of representation throughout the history of the Turkish nation-state, Turkish women parliamentarians have not utilized the opportunities of their position to cooperate on issues affecting women’s empowerment.
Strong party discipline
The first cause can be dedicated to an important aspect of Turkish political culture – the existence of strong party discipline: Political parties prescribe and control the activities of their MPs and Turkish MPs rely on their parties for re-election that in turn strengthens party discipline (Kabasakal, 2014). Institutionally, Turkey’s electoral system is featured with closed party lists coupled with the Law on Political Parties, which allows parties to determine their candidate nomination process and leads to the emergence of highly centralized parties. In practice, a party’s highest ranks and/or executive committees, formed by the party leadership, are tasked with deciding the party lists. Likewise, party policies and programs are formulated exclusively by a party’s highest-ranking members and then transferred to local party actors (Bektas & Issever-Ekinci, 2018). Women MPs are, thus, constrained by party discipline regardless of their party affiliation.
For instance, when a woman MP from the government party supported the opposition party’s proposal to add a clause that would alleviate gender inequality during the revisions of the Civil Code in 2002, she was forced by her party to resign (Ayata & Tütüncü, 2008a). This incident shows the strength of party discipline in enforcing party positions and preventing cooperation between MPs from different parties in representing women’s issues in legislation. In other words, if women MPs seek collaboration with other women MPs, it is likely to be under the roof of the same political party.
Patriarchal norms and values
While strict party discipline is a prominent obstacle for women deputies, all women politicians share one problem: the societal and traditional roles assigned to them. Female politicians are directed to commissions that reflect their responsibilities as caregivers and parties tend to expect and relegate women branches to only express interest in women’s issues (Uysal, Akgül, Köksal & Alemdar, 2020). Women participate in politics either “before they get married” or “when they get older”, even if they are better educated than their male counterparts (Yildirim & Kocapinar, 2019). Even when they are active, women’s greater engagement with family responsibilities continues to hinder their political participation and exclude them from decision-making processes because crucial party decisions are taken at gatherings in restaurants or hotels (Sumbaş, 2020).
Tansu Çiller, the first woman prime minister in Turkey from 1993 to 1996, also preferred labels such as ‘sister’ (bacı) or ‘mother’ (ana) to suppress any perceived sexual aspect of her femininity. This gender neutralization of women’s visibility in public and politics indicates that political parties, regardless of their ideological differences, tend to preserve the patriarchal structure and traditional division of labor supports (Sumbaş, 2020), reflecting the gendered informal barriers that impact women’s political participation and women’s rights activism. Especially, as inter-party solidarity is rare and given the token status of women due to gendered norms, this makes women MPs more loyal party members rather than cooperating in parliament on issues relating to gender-sensitive policies.
Islamist-secularist values/Turkish-Kurdish ethnic divisions
Furthermore, after a decade of EU accession-oriented gender equality reforms in the 2000s, Turkey’s gender regime has undergone significant changes in line with the Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s authoritarian-populist turn (Güneş-Ayata & Doğangün, 2017). In the institutional framework, gender equality is being replaced by the Islamic notions of fıtrat (purpose of creation) that attribute differential natures to men and women, and gender complementarity, which designates the family as:
“the only institution within which women’s sexuality can rightly be expressed and their sanctified role, motherhood, realized”
Özyeğin, 2015
Under the AKP rule, laicism was discredited and labeled as an imposed-from-above principle of Western/Kemalist modernity, and the notion of equality ceased to inform the state’s gender policies (Çağatay, 2018). The laicism–Islamism divide kept being reproduced over women’s bodies but the link between laicism and women’s public inclusion further diminished as greater numbers of covered women began to participate in the public sphere. Notably, traditional Islamist-secularist and Turkish-Kurdish ethnic divisions deepened further following the 2014 Kurdish Kobani uprising, the 2015 ISIS terrorist attacks, and the 2018 de-jure transition to the presidential system (Taşkın, 2021). Within multi-party politics since the 1940s, the increasing hegemony of the AKP government and changes to a presidential system resulted in the regime’s manifestation of executive and judicial control within a polarized political landscape due to religious preferences to suppress various forms of opposition (Yılmaz, 2020).
As Joshi (2023) mentions, the politicization of religion and ethnicity in the regional context has given additional weight to religious leaders to influence politics. In Turkey, this has prompted an “Islamization race” between parties displaying their leaders’ religious credentials while contesting for a more Islamic form of governance (Arosoaie & Osman, 2019). Hence, the fragmentation of the political opposition and the ideological distance between the secular social-democrat, the nationalist, and the pro-Kurdish parties have been obstacles to the formation of a coalition government, not to mention the cooperation of women MPs (Sayarı 2016).
As a result, the social cleavage between Islamists and secularists in Turkey hampers women’s empowerment and supports the argument that pious women quit the struggle for women’s rights and now defend the patriarchal status-quo since they came to power in 2002 with the pro-Islamist AKP (Turam, 2008). Especially, due to the scarcity of inter-party solidarity and the tendency to assign women MPs a symbolic or token status based on gendered norms, these factors lead women parliamentarians to prioritize loyalty to their respective political parties. Consequently, this emphasis on party allegiance often takes precedence over collaborative efforts in the parliament, particularly on issues related to gender-sensitive policies among women MPs. This has prevented women MPs, especially pro-Islamist AKP members, from effectively acting for women.
Conclusion
Along with the socio-cultural constraints and political developments, Islamist-secularist/Turkish-Kurdish ethnic divisions and traditionally gendered expectations have prevented women representatives from cooperating to address women’s issues through strong party discipline. This contributes to the dialogue about the relationship between the descriptive-substantive representation of women by challenging the notion that the presence of a critical mass of women MPs, which is the minimum number of women representatives needed to bring about meaningful and lasting change in decision-making processes, will lead to inter-party coalitions amongst women.
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This paper was written for a Politics course on gender politics (Topics in Political Science I)
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