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.

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.

Do party elites strategically nominate (un)veiled women in elections? Existing scholarship has explored this question in Muslim-minority countries. However, little is known about the dynamics of such strategies within Muslim-majority contexts, where the interplay of Islam, secularism, gender, and veiling is complex. To address this gap, I examine electoral competition in Turkey between the Islamist AKP and the secularist CHP. Specifically, I investigate whether the AKP strategically nominates unveiled women for mayoral seats in CHP strongholds to capitalize on the political symbols associated with their identities—a strategy I term ‘symbolic leverage.’ Drawing on an original dataset and elite interviews, I find that the AKP leverages the symbolic value of unveiled women candidates in CHP strongholds to appeal to secular voters. This strategy serves multiple objectives for party elites: signaling tolerance for secular lifestyles, assuaging concerns about Islamization, attracting swing voters, and projecting a democratic image.