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Abstract

Democratic backsliding and the organized opposition against gender equality agenda accelerate in many countries. However, the content and the process of this trend require further investigation. This dissertation explores the emerging repressive conservative gendered labor regime in Turkey as an extreme case, which has exploratory power to understand political agency’s role on policy change. Therefore, the research addresses the following questions: How can we define and contextualize the gendered labor dynamics of Turkey in a comparative perspective? How did the content of gendered labor policy change in the AKP-era? How did broader processes of gender policymaking influence the gendered policy change for women, and particularly through which causal mechanisms did GONGOs and their ideas lead this change to happen? Two qualitative data sources are used in this dissertation: policy documents and in-depth interviews. First, to understand the content of gendered labor policy change the dissertation relies on a structured qualitative content analysis of a comprehensive set of policy documents. The analysis identifies a paradigm shift in the AKP era from gender equality to gender justice, in the beginning of 2010s. It reveals that the ideational framework of the policy shift is reflected in multiple trajectories of the interaction of neoliberalism with status equality-oriented gender equality and cultural relativist gender justice. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to the theoretical discussions on gender norms by examining their tandem with neoliberalism at the policy level. Second, to examine how political processes of gender policymaking influenced policy change, 68 interviews with policy makers and policy influencers were conducted and analyzed. The analysis demonstrates the crucial role that GONGOs – as prominent contemporary actors, initiated or supported by the government – play to induce policy change. Based on this analysis, the dissertation contributes to the literature on the changing gender regimes under authoritarianism by revealing the mechanisms that GONGOs use to influence policy change with their gender justice agenda.