Local Power and Female Political Pathways in Turkey: Cycles of Exclusion

0537492 - OÚ 2021 RIV GB eng B - Monography
Drechselová, Lucie
Local Power and Female Political Pathways in Turkey: Cycles of Exclusion.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 281 s. Gender and Politics. ISBN 978-3-030-47143-9
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : political participation * gender and politics * local politics * municipalities * political parties * quotas * representation * Turkey * Kurdish politics
OECD category: Political science

The monograph focuses on the issue of women’s under-representation in local politics in contemporary Turkey. The intermediary level of politics – party presence in municipalities – is studied with a double approach distinguishing among political parties (AKP, CHP, MHP, and the pro-Kurdish HDP & DBP) as well as among cities (Izmir, Trabzon and Diyarbakır). The Anglo-American body of literature in political sociology is put into dialogue with the French research in the fields of sociology of mobilization, of political elites and of institutions. Gendered perspective is transversal to the whole monograph. The conclusions are based on a fieldwork done in 2014, 2015 and 2016 in Izmir, Trabzon and Diyarbakır which took the form of ethnographic observation and semi-directed interviews with two hundred female municipal councilors and women holding an intra- party office. Conceptually, seeing parties as heterogeneous entities allows us to study exchanges that take place within the party hierarchy. The place and role of women in the candidate selection processes questions the artificial separation between the “local” and the “national”. Throughout the chapters, it becomes clear that women’s profiles and political carriers are intrinsically linked to modalities of their access to electoral mandate, which in turn determines the ways in which women embody their role as elected figures. The distinctive party ethoses contribute to privilege specific individual and collective strategies over others. The monograph concludes that in order to understand the levels of women’s local representation, the “party” criteria has bigger explanatory value than the local configurations
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0316555