Critical Acts without a Critical Mass: The Substantive Representation of Women in the Turkish Parliament BY AYS ¸E GU ¨ NES ¸ AYATA AND FATMA TU ¨ TU ¨ NCU ¨ ABSTRACT Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 20 women MPs and parliamentary debates during the amendment of the Turkish Civil and Penal Codes, we elaborate on the possibility and conditions of women’s impact on politics without their constituting a critical mass in the parliament. Our research reveals that when state machinery, women’s machinery, and supra-national agencies have created a conducive context, as in the case of the last decade in Turkey, the substantive representation of women’s issues become possible even in a political culture where women constitute only a ‘skewed’ group in the parliament. WOMEN are latecomers to the political arena as representatives in the world’s parliaments. Moreover, there has been very slow progress in achieving women’s greater descriptive representation. The effectiveness of women representatives has also been questioned. Attempts by early feminist scholars to explain this situation generated two contentions. First, the apparent limited effectiveness of women representatives was accounted for by their low levels of representation; this would be over- come when women representatives constituted a ‘critical mass’ articu- lating ‘women’s perspectives and interests’. Second, it was claimed that women’s descriptive representation could be more quickly achieved through the use of quotas. Hence, feminists in many countries support quotas, and there has been strong pressure for such measures at the international level, through bodies such as the IPU and Socialist International, and through international agreements and conventions, such as CEDAW. 1 Whether women’s descriptive representation has any substantive sig- nificance is a widely debated issue in the gender and politics literature. Lovenduski, e.g. has argued that ‘women’s issues’ and ‘women’s per- spectives’ are different, and whereas women’s issues have always been present in parliament, it is the women’s perspective that is of greater significance. 2 It is often said that to bring ‘women’s perspective’ into politics requires a critical mass of women. Women members, where Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 61 No. 3 # The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org doi: 10.1093/pa/gsn012 Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 61 No. 3, 2008, 461–475 Advance Access Publication 29 February 2008 at Abant Izzet Baysal University on March 4, 2015 http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from