For decades it seemed that women’s representation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) had permanently fallen behind other world regions. Today the picture is rapidly changing in the Maghreb, which includes Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Women today hold on average 27% of legislative seats in the Maghreb compared with an average of 10% in the rest of the MENA countries. These rates are surprising, given that general attitudes towards women’s rights and leadership remain relatively conservative. This paper asks: 1) What accounts for the increase in women’s legislative representation through the adoption of quotas at the national and local levels in the Maghreb in recent years compared to other regions? 2) Why have we seen these developments, particularly in the Maghreb, and to a much lesser extent in other MENA countries? It also explores how these developments challenge existing explanations for female representation that have been developed crossnationally regarding the role of oil rents, culture, religion, and kinship ties to the state, the role of unified legal structures, among others. The paper is part of a research project I am currently conducting in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, involving in-depth interviews and content analysis of newspapers.

The literature on women and politics has identified party competition as one of the key opportunity structures that contribute to women’s recruitment as candidates, and consequently increasing women’s descriptive representation. Scholars have identified that when smaller and more leftist parties adopt gender quotas, they increase their electoral appeal and support. This increase in voter support encourages larger and more conservative parties to follow suit to remain competitive. Therefore, the male party leaders’ assumption that women are ‘risk’ candidates has increasingly shifted to imagining women as political tools to garner voter support. Parties that have evolved out of religious political movements, including Islamist movements, have particularly used this tactic to appear modern, egalitarian, and democratic. Based on extensive field research, this paper discusses the specific ways electoral competition serves as an important opportunity structure for diverse women’s groups in Turkey as they strategize for women’s increased access to political office. I show that Turkey’s strong party structure and electoral system has enabled women activists, both from within and outside of party structures, to pressure party leaders to increase women’s nomination and recruitment. When such women’s organizing led to the adoption and implementation of gender quotas on behalf of a leftist and pro-minority party in Turkey, women activists used this success to pressure larger parties to follow suit to remain competitive. For instance, the gender parity measures of the leftist People’s Democratic Party (HDP) encouraged the conservative ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to nominate record number of women onto their candidate lists for the June 2015 parliamentary elections. However, based on my field data, I also argue that party competition only goes so far as to guarantee women’s sufficient candidacy. In fact, when competition is intensified between two opposing parties as it occurred in the snap elections of November 2015 in Turkey, leadership of both leftist HDP and rightist AKP notably decreased the percentage of women candidates on their lists. Surprisingly, other parties that did not face such fierce competition increased the rate of their female candidates from June to November’s snap elections to increase their electoral appeal. Through a comparative analysis with major elections in Iran where similar trends are also seen, this paper argues that party leaders are willing to nominate women to increase their electoral appeal. However, when competition intensifies between two parties, women are once again transformed into ‘risk’ candidates in the eyes of male party leaders.

The elections of 2011 and the resulting constitutional project in Tunisia after the uprisings represented the first major attempt at (re)defining Tunisian citizenship in a post-authoritarian democratic environment, a task that has always been the purview of the state. Ultimately, however, the definition of citizenship and access to it is mediated through the non-objective lens of social and political practice. In other words, the state constructs the parameters of citizenship, but individuals entering that structure are culturally and historically constituted. Gender, an identity marker that has historically mediated access to political, economic, and social rights, features heavily in the final 2014 constitution, after markedly evolving in the drafting process, including a constitutionalisation of electoral gender parity. This was due to the collaborative work of Le Groupe des Femmes, spearheaded by Mehrezia Labidi, the Nahdhawia Vice-President of the National Constituent Assembly, and Lobna Jribi, a prominent deputy from Ettakatol. Le Groupe des Femmes was an informal parliamentary working group made up of around thirty of the fifty-nine female deputies in the National Constituent Assembly. It represented a truly multi-partisan effort, with representation from the ruling coalition of Ennahdha, Ettakatol, CPR, the opposition blocs such as Bloc Démocrates, Transition Démocratique, Alliance Démocratique, and opposition parties such as Al Massar, Al Joumhouhri, and Nidaa Tounes. This paper interrogates the (re)making of the female citizen by female deputies, relying on over 250 hours qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted by the author in April 2012 and September 2013-October 2014. It analyzes the highly specific discursive landscape of gendered constitutional language through its evolution in the constitutional project and the political strategies of Le Groupe des Femmes. This analysis reveals the ideological and structural barriers that continued to face female political actors within institutions and how these actors navigated, negotiated, and overcame these challenges to gender the constitution. More broadly, this analysis reveals the emergence of a new set of norms within the Tunisian political system, one that undermines the popular understanding of Tunisian politics as a binary between Islamism and secularism. The specific actions of Tunisian female deputies, in working together across political positions, reveal the fluidity and multiplicity of their subjectivity, as gendered identity took precedence over political identity in pursuit of a common goal.

Female lawyers in Morocco, Lebanon and Kuwait address similar issues related to patriarchal state laws where the principle of male guardianship impacts the civil rights of female citizens within family law, criminal law, and – in Kuwait and Lebanon – nationality law. However, opinions on political reform among female lawyers in these three states differ. Differences relate to institutional settings, state-specific challenges which some of the lawyers express, and individual views towards what represents an issue of a legalistic, a religious, or a mundane – and therefore – political nature. Excerpts from interviews conducted in 2015 with female lawyers in Morocco, Lebanon and Kuwait provide a backdrop for pointing out variances in how patriarchal state laws are perceived, expressed, and sought reformed in a Maghribi, a Mashriqi, and a Khaliji state after the 2011 Uprisings. One finding is that there is a marked revitalization among female lawyers in Kuwait and Lebanon regarding pressures to change patriarchal state laws, while female lawyers in Morocco face challenges related to implementing and substantiating strengthened female civil rights following the Mudawwana reform in 2004.