UMUT KORKUT AND HANDE ESLEN-ZIYA The Impact of Conservative Discourses in Family Policies, Population Politics, and Gender Rights in Poland and Turkey Abstract This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks into the Polish and Turkish contexts for empirical evidence. The Polish context shows a highly institutionalized system of family policies in contrast to almost unessential institu- tions in Turkey. Formally, the labor market participation of women is much lower in Turkey than in Poland. Yet, given the size of the informal market in Turkey, women’s labor participation is obviously higher than what appears in the statistics. Bearing in mind this divergence, the article suggests Poland and Turkey as two typologies for studying population politics in contexts where socially conservative ideas regarding gender remain paramount. We qualify ideas as conservative if they enforce a traditional understanding of gender relations in care-giving and underline Fall 2011 Pages 387–418 doi:10.1093/sp/jxr014 # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication August 8, 2011 Social Politics 2011 Volume 18 Number 3 at Harvard University on September 9, 2011 sp.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from