The Rise of Women in Local Politics in Turkey: Whereabouts? Up to Where?

In the local elections of 2009, the election was held for 32.485 council memberships in 2.931 municipalities. In this paper, the members of municipal councils were investigated by “full counting” (census) method and analyses were made covering the woman member ratios. In order to be able to use the full counting method, the data published by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TURKSTAT) has been used. TURKSTAT has published the names of the people elected for municipal council membership, their parties and listing numbers for the first time. The names about 32.000 people have been examined one by one and a detailed picture concerned with the women members in municipal council has been provided through this data. Besides examining the ratio of the women members, the relation between the size of the municipalities and women member ratios, the differentiation of women members according to Statistical Region Units (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics=NUTS), women member ratios of different political parties have also been analyzed in this study.