Hamas Women in Municipalities: Patriarchal Politics The 2006 election of six Hamas women to the Palestinian Legislative council has attracted considerable attention from scholars (Jad, 2008, Caridi, 2012, Abou Zeid, 2006). Yet the election of Hamas women in 2004-2005 municipal elections has been given much less attention. Drawing on interviews with Hamas women in West Bank towns and villages since 2008, this paper raises two critical points about the process and outcome of these elections. First, women’s election was to be boosted by the introduction of a quota system in the Electoral Law of 2004 but in fact most women won outright because of prominence in local communities. And while this has caused some analysts (Rula Abu Daho, 2009) to see that women were overcoming patriarchal obstacles I argue that this is not the case. Rather, women have been coopted by family and hamula ties and circumscribed in performing their elected roles. Second, this paper argues that the Hamas leadership decision to involve women in municipal (as well as national) politics reflects no ideological change with regard to women’s traditional role in the eyes of Islamists (Haideh Moghassi, 1993) but rather a strategy of political expediency designed to maximize voter support as noted in the case of the Yemeni Islah group (Schwedler, 2003).