The issue of whether and under what conditions female politicians represent women’s interests has been a central concern of gender and politics research. Explanatory frameworks and extant research so far looked at democratic polities to anayze the relative significance of specific factors or constrains impacting on women’s claim to pursue policy on the concerns of women voters. The hypothesis of this paper is that besides the multiplicity of the dynamics impacting on politician’s stances towards women’s issues, actual substantive representation (i.e., acting for women) takes many forms, and the boundary separating feminist or non-feminist representation is likely to be fluid, and often contingent on both the issues debated and on institutional factors. The case of Turkish women politicians from the Justice and Development Party (JDP) is highly relevant to unravel the implications of conservative party politics in a hybrid regime under conditions of deepeing polarization on women’s representation. Entrenched through the ‘‘Turkish-style presidential system’’ personalizing and concentrating power in hyper-masculine and neo-patrimonial leadership, the regime change has had repercussions for female politicians’ representative claims towards women, and for their political careers. This research is inspired with a concern to gender the literature on populist gender politics with insights from state feminism and women’s representation to analyze the discourses and the approaches of a conservative-populist party ‘s women parliemantary representatives and Women’s Branches figures. The research question is ‘‘how the formal and informal dynamics of illiberal governance, authoritarian party structure, and populist politics are reflected in the approaches to and discursive stances of the JDP’s female politicians in Turkey on the most pressing women’s issues such as the struggle on violence against women and women’s civil rights in marriage and divorce. The qualitative research of the paper makes use of insights from feminist new institutionalism, and frame analysis as the research procedure, to analyze the data from women politician's speeches, bills, declarations, projects, and other public appeals within and outside the Turkish parliament. The paper concludes that the representation of women through female politicians of the JDP government is shaped by formal and informal political institutionalization transcending ideological and identity politics.

A growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes may gain international legitimacy when they undertake reforms. According to several studies, for example, Saudi Arabia and Jordan promote women’s empowerment in part to signal modernity and Western-friendliness to international audiences, potentially obviating the need to undertake deeper political reform (e.g., Al-Rasheed 2013; Bush 2019; Tripp 2019). To date, however, these hypotheses have not been tested experimentally. This paper helps fill the gap by presenting results from an iterative series of experiments conducted over nationally representative samples of US citizens, asking respondents to evaluate hypothetical and actual authoritarian regimes in the Middle East under differing circumstances while assessing a suite of different potential policies toward them. Results consistently suggest that reforms (of a variety of types) do generally enhance legitimacy, yet also provide support for several new and previously undocumented findings: (1) it may be easier for authoritarian regimes to obtain positive “boosts” in legitimacy (such as higher favorability ratings and support for positive actions, e.g. increased trade) than it is for them to “shield” themselves from punitive actions (e.g., boycotts and cutting off relations); (2) inward-facing and prodemocratic reforms, especially liberal initiatives like enhancing women’s rights and autonomy, produce the strongest “boosting” benefits in terms of favorability and positive actions; (3) more outward-facing reforms that stress benefits and contributions to global welfare, such as commitments to scientific advances or reductions in carbon emissions, produce the strongest “shielding” benefits; and (4) monarchies undertaking reforms gain fewer “boosting” benefits, compared to military dictatorships, due to high baseline levels of support, while demonstrating greater resilience to skeptical responses about their reforms.

Turkey is increasingly described as a populist authoritarian country, governed in the name of “the people” by a party that has seized control of most parts of the state and media. This has also coincided with extensive investments in large-scale infrastructure projects as “development,” and a populist weaponization of culture, “us” versus “them,” that hinges on patriarchal gender norms. Populist authoritarianism in Turkey increasingly features the promise of providing infrastructure as tangible “development,” but only for those citizen-subjects who fall under the category of “decent”, “patient”, and “loyal”—in other words, deserving in very gendered ways. Disabled women have been especially affected by these trends as their mobility is often intimately imbricated with the infrastructure provided by the state. At the same time, disability is profoundly gendered in Turkey (like elsewhere), and the country’s patriarchal norms shape how some disabled women experience their conditions, and how they seek to improve their lives. This research examines how disabled women navigate their everyday lives under such conditions and relate to the populist authoritarian state in Turkey. This research particularly focuses on how infrastructural moment in populist authoritarian context of Turkey affects disabled women’s political practices, strategies, and discourses based on 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara. By studying the interrelations of the material and the cultural through gender and disability, this research will contribute to the ethnographic and theoretical work on infrastructure, gender and disability as well as everyday authoritarianism and populism.

This paper inquires into the political roles and functions of first ladies in the Middle East. It focuses on how their roles and functions change during security crises in authoritarian regimes, such as popular protests, economic crises, leadership change or the Covid-19 pandemic. In contrast to the vibrant public discussion that depicts first ladies as the symbols of the (mal)functioning of authoritarian rule, academic research on first ladies in the Middle East, and on female leaders as political and economic actors under authoritarianism more broadly, is still am under-researched field. These lacunae impact our understanding of authoritarian rule given that these female leaders have access to, and are, as I argue, part of the centers of authoritarian power together with the ruler and the politically relevant elites. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative analysis of the role of Queen Rania of Jordan during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this role feeds into the neoliberal security state of King Abdullah II. It highlights how the Queen's political, social and economic activities and speeches complement the security-oriented activities by the King on the national, regional and international level during the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study.

Extant scholarship argues that electoral gender quotas are a form of “genderwashing” that autocrats strategically use to make their country appear more democratic. Yet when it comes to the impact of quotas on foreign public opinion, this hypothesis is untested. We conceptualize Gender Diplomacy as the visible, strategic use of women as a public diplomacy and nation branding strategy to improve international perceptions among foreign governments and publics. Using a web-based survey experiment, we randomly expose more than 800 US-based students to a vignette and photo of either an all-male Federal National Council described as having 40 seats or a mixed-gender Council described as having a quota reserving 50 percent of seats for women and assess the impact on respondents’ perceptions of the UAE. Subsequently, we assess the impact on respondents’ perceptions of the level of democracy in the UAE. The results show that Gender Diplomacy increases the extent to which the UAE is seen as democratic, and it does so among nearly all US-based sub-groups. We argue that this effect is due to the implicit association between positive gender-based trait stereotypes such as kindness and trustworthiness and the country of the UAE, suggesting that countries are seen in gendered ways that reflect how the media depicts their leaders. In support of our implicit associations theory, in our analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects, we find that those who hold explicit, positive stereotypes about females as honest are more likely to be shaped by gender diplomacy than those who do not. On no indicator did women in leadership undermine the UAE’s international reputation, suggesting that for the case of the UAE, we detect only benefits and no downside to ensuring that females are the country’s visible leaders. By conceptualizing gender diplomacy and experimentally testing the mechanism underlying its impact on US students’ views of the UAE, our research contributes to debates among scholars and practitioners about the complex effects of women’s empowerment in authoritarian and patriarchal settings. It points to the strong role that cognitive bias in the form of implicit associations play in shaping perceptions and thus the potential for autocrats and others to use Gender Diplomacy to accomplish their public diplomacy objectives.