Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/11147/2496
Title: Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy
Authors: Şenol, Fatma
Keywords: Citizenship
Neighborhood office
Female candidacy
Muhtar
Womens status
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd.
Source: Şenol, F. (2009). Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy. Political Geography, 28(6), 362-372. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.09.004
Abstract: This study is about how gender and local urban scales interact with each other to influence individuals' motivations and resources for political recruitment. The data came from interviews with twenty women who ran for and lost the 2004 local elections for their neighborhood office, muhtarlik, in Eskisehir, Turkey. Considering both individual and institutional factors and the neighborhood scale as important for women's candidacy for local offices, this paper relies on a "relational" view of citizenship while examining the mediating roles of the local scale for citizenship. My findings overall disagreed with the arguments that "women's interests" drive women to enter politics and that the local offices provide more opportunities for women's political recruitment. As women's roles and responsibilities had been changing across multiple spaces, they ran for elections to search for ways to practice their capacities in public arenas. Yet to the electorates, first, even women with high qualities for the office did not appear as the most qualified candidates. Second, most electorates tended to evaluate candidacy qualities in relation to the neighborhood office's weak status in Turkish political system and as an unskilled job. Third, they seemed to associate this "job" positively with men's traditional domestic role as the main breadwinner, consider women's charity and communal works as women's traditional care responsibilities, and to vote mostly for over-middle-aged male incumbents with locally embedded relations. Finally, women missed an opportunity for their candidacy by not transforming their local network-based assets into resources for candidacy.
URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.09.004
http://hdl.handle.net/11147/2496
ISSN: 0962-6298
0962-6298
Appears in Collections:City and Regional Planning / Şehir ve Bölge Planlama
Scopus İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / Scopus Indexed Publications Collection
WoS İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / WoS Indexed Publications Collection

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