Women's Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table

by Mona Tajali

Overview

How have women in many Muslim-majority countries been able to achieve surprising success despite the significant constraints imposed by conservative gender ideology and authoritarian political parties and systems? Through a comparative focus on Iran and Turkey, Mona Tajili examines the activities and strategies of women’s rights groups across the ideological spectrum. She explores how various groups have negotiated with political elites in order to bolster female political representation and identifies the conditions that stimulate greater support to ease women’s path to political office. Studying how women’s groups manoeuvre within these structures is important to help our understanding of the gendered politics of autocratic regimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474499477
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mona Tajali is associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. She has authored (with Homa Hoodfar) Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (WLUML 2011), and several scholarly articles on gender and politics in the Middle East. Since 2007 she has been collaborating with the research wing of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) transnational solidarity network and since 2019 serves as a member of its executive board.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Women and Politics in Muslim Countries
2. Opportunity Structures: Strategizing for Women’s Political Representation in Turkey and Iran
3. Turkish Women as Political Agents: Between Secularism and Islamic Revivalism
4. Strategic Interactions: Multi-party politics and the lobby for female representation
5. Framing for Political Inclusion: The Demand for Headscarved Women’s Candidacy
6. Women and Politics in Iran: From Revolutionary to Reformist
7. Organizing Against All Odds: Iranian Factionalism and Women’s Political Representation
8. Piety and Agency: Framing Women’s Political Rights in a Theocratic State
9. Conclusion: Demanding a Seat at the Table

Editorial Reviews

This is a superb book that tackles important and puzzling questions: What explains the fact that both Turkey and Iran have witnessed increases in women’s formal political representation in recent years, especially in the context of resurgent authoritarianism, and on behalf of conservative political actors? And what explains the differences in the patterns of these changes in representation in the two countries? Tajali’s nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive account elucidates the interaction between women’s activism, the interests of political elites, electoral structures, and political opportunities that lead to qualitatively divergent outcomes. Tajali offers in-depth insight into the strategy, ingenuity, and resilience of women’s political organizing and lobbying of political elites – including secular, religious, conservative, and reformist elites - giving us a rare view of the agency of women’s movements even under the most challenging institutional and political circumstances. This is an essential reading for anyone interested in women’s rights and gender politics in the MENA region, and in gender and politics within authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes more broadly.

Lihi Ben Shitrit

Tajali illuminates how Turkish women take advantage of multiparty competition to increase their representation and how Iran’s weak party structure and factionalism hinder women trying to expand their political roles. [...] Overall, this study offers keen insight into women’s struggle for political representation in these countries and provides useful background for understanding the role of Iranian women in the 2022 protests.

CHOICE - J. G. Everett

Tajali’s meticulously researched and well-argued book provides an invaluable framework for understanding the complexities of women’s political representation in Iran and Turkey.

Middle East Journey - Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Mobina Riazi

Tajali has provided a valuable and in-depth analysis of women's rights groups' activities and strategies.

The Muslim News - Mahomed Faizal

Mona Tajali’s book provides a deep dive into women’s political strategies in Iran and Turkey. This unique study, which is based on extensive fieldwork, looks at women’s efforts across the political spectrum to carve out political leadership roles and influence for themselves in two challenging political environments. This empirically rich book offers the reader important and fascinating insights into how women in Iran and Turkey vote, what issues are important to them, as well as how party activists navigate the political world and express their political aspirations

Aili Mari Tripp

Women's Organizing for Political Representation in Iran and Turkey forcefully challenges essentialist conceptions of the ways that Muslim women engage in politics. By employing standard political science tools such as analysis of electoral rules, party competition, and election strategy, Tajali shows that conservative women’s organizations are highly mobilized in these two countries and have made surprising gains in women’s political participation. In both countries, for example, conservative male political elites have appointed women to leadership positions, women’s issues have been brought to the forefront of the political agenda, and the percentage of women in legislative office has increased—even doubling in the 2016 elections in Iran. Overall, the book provides a fascinating and important contribution to our knowledge of women’s political participation.

Professor Lisa Baldez