Different Regimes, Shared Policy Struggles: Rethinking Gender Politics in Turkey and the United Kingdom

This paper examines how two politically distinct regimes, Turkey and the United Kingdom, have produced similar patterns of gender-related policy conflict despite their divergent institutional trajectories. It focuses on the post-2020 period, during which gender politics became a central arena of political contestation in both countries. In Turkey, this period was set in motion by the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, while in the UK it was shaped by debates surrounding Gender Recognition Act reform. In recent years, regime studies have focused on global autocratisation, democratic backsliding, and institutional erosion, largely through comparative regime classifications and macro-level indicators (Levitsky and Way 2010; Bermeo 2016; Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Ginsburg and Huq 2017). While this literature has significantly advanced our understanding of regime change, it remains less attentive to how such transformations are enacted through concrete policy domains. This paper addresses this limitation by conceptualising gender conflict as a policy arena through which regimes exercise power and (re)consolidate authority. Drawing on a comparative discursive and policy analysis, the paper identifies converging patterns of gender policy framing and policymaking across the two cases. By tracing these similarities across distinct regime contexts, the paper shows how gender politics offers a useful lens for rethinking contemporary processes of regime transformation.