Gender has become a hot button issue in the Arab world, particularly after the Arab spring, when parliamentary gender quotas were introduced or maintained in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and other countries. At the same time, little is known about barriers to female candidates at the polls. Using data from an original survey of 1200 Tunisians and 4800 Egyptians conducted in 2012, this paper considers whether and why gendered stereotypes affect support for male and female candidates in Tunisia and Egypt. The study asks respondents how likely they would be to vote for candidates with stereotypically female roles (i.e. working in a civil society organization that provides school supplies for children) and stereotypically male roles (i.e. a successful business person). Using an experimental design, it randomly presents respondents with either a male or female candidate. The results show that while female candidates are always less popular than the male candidates, the gap in support for the male versus the female candidate is small when the candidate is involved in civil society and large when the candidate is a business person. This study shows the impact of gendered stereotypes on potential voters’ willingness to support women candidates.

The images of hundreds of thousands of Iranian women, in protest rallies after June 2009 election, wearing green scarves, astonished and fascinated the world. It was reminiscent of the 1979 revolution when women’s black veil emerged as a public symbol of the revolution. The lack of information about the politics of elections in Iran, particularly the role of women therein, has left a sense of obscurity and non-comprehension about Iranian politics. Given the role that gender ideology and gender politics plays in Iran’s national policies and in various political camps/factions, this lack of attention is even more striking. This paper reviews party politics, particularly since 1997, examining the extent to which Iranian political parties consider women as actual or potential political constituencies that should be courted and mobilized in support of their platforms. It outlines the extent to which the mobilization and outreach strategies of the various religious conservative, reformist and neo-Islamist parties differ, by analyzing the programs and policies directed to women on the part of political parties, and the degree to which they regard women as their base. While the conservatives have largely focused on extending women’s economic opportunities within conventional feminine professions, the reformists have addressed the demands of urban middle class women, focusing on expanding women’s rights and their public participation, reforming family law, and nurturing a civil rights movement with gender rights and freedom of expression issues at its core. Neo-Islamists, on the other hand, have focused on courting young, low-income women and attending to their aspirations by opening more avenues for their public participation through institutionalized volunteering and social and economic advancement. The question is whether or to what extent these policies translate into votes for the political parties/candidates or generally lead to a politicization of women’s issues. The presidential election of 2009 and subsequent protest and counter rallies provided a fertile ground for the political parties to assess their women’s and gender policies. This paper examines the extent to which the considerable agency of women and their proactive roles in support of reformist candidates, the Green Movement, and protest rallies can be explained by the policies of the main political parties and the extent women supporters of neo-Islamists managed to expand their sphere of influence within their political camps and how these may change in the presidential election scheduled for June 2013.

Turkish and Iranian women have been playing an increasingly visible role in informal or “street” politics, such as voting, voter-recruitment, and running political campaigns, including on behalf of pro-religious parties. But continue to be underrepresented in formal decision-making positions. The struggle to assume more high-level leadership positions is leading some women to increasingly engage in strategic interactions with male political elites. Juxtaposing the campaigns of conservative party women for addressing female political underrepresentation in both countries, this paper presents the different discourses used by Iranian and Turkish women’s groups as they demand access to political leadership positions. By analyzing women’s main framing processes in mobilizing support surrounding their demand, this paper highlights women’s initiatives as they utilize discourses that are influenced by opportunities arising out of national and international contexts. Through analyzing women’s campaigning efforts in both countries, I argue that while Turkish women have justified their claims through international documents and human rights discourses of the EU and UN, Iranian women have legitimized their claims in religious terms, in order to find resonance with the political elites. In Turkey, many of the pious Muslim women who have been active with the pro-religious ruling Justice and Development Party are articulating their demands for inclusion in formal politics through international documents and human rights discourses of the UN and EU. Pious Turkish women’s groups are increasingly using the non-discriminatory language of CEDAW to demand headscarved women’s access to the parliament. Turkey, a secular country which has ratified CEDAW, and a candidate country for EU accession, provides its women’s rights groups, both pious and secular, with critical international and transnational political opportunity structures. Conversely, in the context of Iran’s theocratic regime, women’s rights groups across the ideological spectrum, out of necessity and tactical need, frame and justify their demands for women’s increased political representation in religious terms. In large part to avoid being branded as Western, Iranian women use the examples of strong female religious figures, such as Fatima and Zeinab, or refer to Qur’an’s story of the Queen of Sheeba. Such women centered religious reinterpretation enables Iranian women’s rights activists to frame their demands in terms of social justice, gender equality, and women’s rights, all of which are presented as compatible with Islamic doctrine. Such naming and framing processes highlight the significance of political and social opportunities and contexts in shaping women’s discourses and strategies regardless of their level of religiosity.

This paper studies the impact of legislated women's quotas religious parties in the Middle East. The adoption of women's quotas is destabilizing the Middle East's long held place at the very bottom of global rankings of women’s representation. But there is still much debate over the utility of descriptive presence for women's meaningful participation in political life. This study sets to demonstrate an important way by which quotas are in fact contributing to a transformation in attitudes toward women’s role in the political sphere. By examining the impact that women's quotas have on religious parties – affiliated with religious movements that advocate a divinely sanctioned and explicitly conservative gender ideology – the paper identifies the significant symbolic utility of quotas. The study traces variation in the electoral platforms, campaign rhetoric, internal discourse and policies pertaining to women’s representation pursued by religious parties across three quota contexts: a. candidate quotas; b. reserved seats and; c. no quotas. The first is the case of Hamas during the 2006 Palestinian national election. The 2006 election included a 20% women candidate quota for national party lists. The second case is the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in the 2010 election, in which 64 seats were reserved for women, and the 2011 election in which this reservation had been removed. The third case examines both Islamic and Jewish religious movements (the Islamic Movement and Shas) in the no-quota context of Israel. The paper shows that in the absence of quotas (Israel) socially conservative religious parties can ignore the question of women's representation, devalue it or, when pressed, justify non-inclusion. Reserved seats (Egypt) lead to tokenism, rationalization of non-inclusion and, worse, the tainting of the agenda for women's representation by its association with authoritarian practices. Legislated candidate quotas (Palestine) which guarantee a significant percent of women's representation on candidate lists lead to a noticeable transformation in the discourse and practices of religious parties. In the Palestinian case, Hamas had to not only justify and defend its inclusion of women candidates, it also had to convince its supporters and potential voters that this inclusion was grounded in authentic religious doctrine and was not simply a concession to secular and liberal women’s advocacy efforts. The large number of Hamas women candidate also contributed to a “critical mass” in terms of the public attention the movement had to devote to the issue of women's representation.