The Road Toward Election: Women’s Exclusion from Electoral Lists

Abstract

Political parties are gateways to electoral politics in Turkey. That is why the candidate selection process which takes place within the parties is so instrumental in determining women’s political representation. With a lot at stake, the parties tend to relegate the selection of candidates into their well-guarded “secret garden.” It is throughout this non-transparent procedure that female candidates get excluded or placed at the bottom of the electoral lists. Across the political spectrum, women’s inclusion appears to be of secondary importance and women are used as parts of a bargain between the local party structures and party headquarters. This chapter shows that the so-called democratizing measures often produce adverse effects on women’s representation and that centralized selection of women can produce the highest women’s ratio.