Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
POLITICS GROUPS AND IDENTITIES, 2022 (SSCI)
Women-specific political bodies provide a space for women-focused deliberation, gender analysis of policy, and women's access to the decision-making process. Women's councils are designed to act as decentralized mechanisms with the goal of increasing women's representation in terms of diversity, inclusion, and responsiveness in the local governance of Turkey. The article, based on in-depth interview data, scrutinizes the capacities and limitations of women's councils to enhance women's representation in the case of women's councils of Ankara, Turkey. It has been found that the financial ties of women's councils to the municipalities, the male-dominated partisan character of political parties, and the gendered elite networks at the local level offer few alternatives for women "standing for, speaking for, and acting for" in these councils. These implicitly and explicitly harm the core rationale of women's councils to make women and their diverse demands a visible part of the institutional identity in the local governance. Rather, such a structure serves to further reproduce the masculine nature of local politics. This article contributes to the literature on women's representation and local politics by using empirical data from Turkey to assess whether alternative, women-only structures facilitate women's representation and the conditions under which they can act.