Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy Fatma Senol * Izmir Institute of Technology/Department of City and Regional Planning, Mimarlik Fakultesi/ E-Blok Oda: B-08, Guzelbahce Koyu, URLA, 35430 IZMIR/Turkey Keywords: Citizenship Female candidacy Local elections Neighborhood offices Muhtar Turkey 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 exam- ining 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. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Sevgi, a female candidate for the elected office of her neighbor- hood in 2004, evaluated the result of that election: ‘‘We lost the election not at but around the ballot box’’ (original emphasis). She still argues that she was qualified for the office, as she had been always supportive of and well-known by her neighbors, i.e., the voters. Now she thinks that, as much as the ‘‘hypocrisy’’ of her neighbors who promised to but did not vote for her, certain characteristics of the election procedure for this office resulted in her loss. This case study examines the conditions under which Sevgi and other women, nearly all of whom lost, ran for their neighborhood office in the 2004 local elections of Turkey. It particularly examines how gender and local urban scales interact with each other to influence individuals’ motivations and resources for recruiting in urban governance, and relates to the studies about the relation- ships between citizenship, place, and democracy. Overall, arguing for analyzing these relationships along with the processes that link economics and politics as experienced locally and differently by individuals and social groups, this paper underlines that citizenship develops via everyday experiences in ‘‘place’’ or locale. The question of how individuals are recruited in politics, and thus who gets what and under which circumstances has new directions in political geography. ‘‘Thinking spatially’’ about citi- zenship (McEwan, 2000), certain studies by political and feminist geographers differ from traditional ones by examining the inter- plays between citizenship and place. They identify and examine the different scales and spaces of citizenship and the abilities of different people to exercise their rights as citizens or even demand for new ones via multiple spaces. They especially re-identify marginal groups’ (such as women) abilities and motivations and also the conveniences of local spaces and scales (such as neigh- borhoods, local organizations, schools, and homes) for improving citizenship rights. Yet most of these studies have been either theoretical or at risk of ‘‘homogenizing effect of western under- standings’’ (Secor, 2004: 271) about the marginal groups’ oppor- tunities for political recruitment. There is a need for more empirical studies, especially in non-Anglo Saxon contexts, which reexamine the expectations about the engendering of citizenship at local scales via daily experiences shaped by social differences. * Tel.: þ90 232 7507069/þ90 533 7714446; fax: þ90 232 7507012. E-mail address: fatmasenol@iyte.edu.tr Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo 0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.09.004 Political Geography 28 (2009) 362–372