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Gender Quotas & Women's Representation in Muslim Countries
The main purpose of this paper is to explain how the quota adoption affects women's representation in predominantly Muslim countries. When answering this question two famous arguments of Inglehart and Norris will be questioned; first secularization processes accompanied by the modernization processes improve gender equality and second, Islamic religious heritage is a barrier to gender equality (Inglehart & Norris, 2003a; 2004). However, there is a variety of cultural practices in regard to women in countries with Islamic heritage. The public policies for women's issues and political participation of women hugely differ from one country to another. While in some countries such as Turkey women enfranchised in 1930 even before the enfranchisement of women in many European countries, women in some countries such as Saudi Arabia still cannot vote or run for the elections. To overlook the differences between countries with Muslim cultural heritage could result one to misconstrue the political situation of women in Muslim societies. Moreover, if Islamic heritage is a real barricade to the women's representation, the countries in which there is a fusion of state and religion would not spend extra efforts to improve women's political representation by adopting gender quotas. Secondly, this paper aims to discover whether Muslim regions have different trends in regard to the determinants of women's representation and quota adoption policies. Scholarly work has been demonstrated various indicators of women's descriptive representation; level of democratization, development level, institutional regulations, level of separation of state and religion, varying interpretation of religious texts, acceptance of international norms or policy preferences of political actors, etc. However, it is also argued by some scholars that democratization, modernization or cultural change contexts has not been adequate to explain women friendly policy changes in some contexts (Htun and Weldon, 2007). Therefore, a systematic analysis of determinants of women's descriptive representation in parliaments would shed some light on the debate in the related literature.
The first part of this paper includes some reflections to this body of literature which consists the theoretical background of this paper. The second part includes an explanation of the data sources and
methods embedded by this study. The third part of the study covers the empirical analyses that investigate whether being a Muslim country has a negative effect on female proportions in single and lower houses of the legislatures. Additionally, it will be questioned whether Muslim countries have different trends of quota adoption than the rest of the world. Lastly, by taking religious affiliation of states as a determinant of women's political access, I will examine whether fusion of religion and state or secularity has an impact on adoption of gender quotas and women's political participation.
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