The Women Elites in Turkish Politics

This study examines the relationship between women and politics through female political elites in Turkish politics. The female elite group in politics is narrowed down to female MPs using the method of positional analysis. This method is chosen because it gives an objective map regarding who is elite and who is not. Besides, assemblies keep records about the elected officials, which are open to the public, which is an essential opportunity for researchers. Descriptive representation of women, in other words, the presence of women in parliament, is an essential indication of the relationship between women and politics. The rate of female parliamentarians in today’s Grand National Assembly of Türkiye (GNAT) is 20%. It was 4.9% in 1935 when women first entered the parliament. Although the increase in the rate is a noticeable improvement, it is not sufficient neither for the descriptive representation nor for the substantive representation of women. At this point, literature has focused on why few women are in politics compared to men. Leading feminist scholars in Turkey argue that there have been fewer female politicians in Turkish politics because of the patriarchal society. However, this study focuses on the female parliamentarians and their profiles by drawing on parliament’s archives and interviews with 20 female deputies who held seats in the 27th legislative term of the GNAT. The study aims to contribute to the knowledge about the profile of women parliamentarians and to the analysis of their social capital from a Bourdesian perspective. Those few women politicians who succeeded in holding a seat in the GNAT, which is a men’s club where historically hegemonic masculinity pervades, can be called positive outliers. The assumption is that most women parliamentarians have succeeded in holding a seat in parliament thanks to their social capital/networks and privileged backgrounds. It is thought that financial and cultural capital are necessary conditions for being a female politician; however, more is needed. At this point, for women politicians, social capital, the networks born into and developed by bridging social capital, is the sine qua non. The interviews conducted with female politicians confirm this argument. It is revealed that those women politicians have either a bonding social capital or a bridging social capital that ascends their position in the political arena. As a result, it can be argued that clientelist relations and the social capital of an individual are still determining in the politics of Turkey. Thus, party politics hinder the substantive representation of women in parliament because those women do not intend to represent their women fellows.