Beyond the ballot box, who really counts in Turkey?

Blog post by Raquel Santos Fernandes and Isabel Estrada Carvalhais, University of Minho, Portugal

Women vote, work and pay taxes, but for many of them, democracy remains an experience that is incomplete, uneven and deeply conditional. This sense of being ‘half-citizen’ goes well beyond the absence of formal rights. It is about how citizenship is experienced and constrained in everyday life. In various political contexts, women’s rights are among the first to be contested or reversed. Restrictions on reproductive rights, reversals on protection against gender-based violence and policies normalizing their responsibility for care reveal how gender inequality exposes the fault lines of citizenship.

In our Identities article, ‘From foes to friends? Fighting against women’s ‘half-citizenship’ through gender-mainstreaming citizenship’, we respond to these tensions by proposing the idea of gender-mainstreaming citizenship. This framework integrates political participation, economic autonomy and intimate rights into a single analytical lens. It challenges the assumption that democracy stops at home’s front door and highlights how inequalities in the private sphere directly undermine democracy. 

Our argument begins from a clear premise: citizenship has historically been founded on gendered assumptions. Classic models of citizenship have been centred on participation in the public sphere as a space long structured around male experiences. By contrast, the private sphere of family life, intimacy, care and bodily autonomy has been treated as marginal to citizenship, despite its decisive role in shaping who can access the public sphere.
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In Turkey, the public/private divide is evident in both historical reforms and contemporary policies. From early republican reforms to more recent family-centred policies, women’s citizenship has been shaped by persistent interpretations of the boundaries between public participation and the private realm. While the access to the public space has been formally recognized, women’s roles within family and intimate life have remained central to how citizenship is defined and regulated, making Turkey a strong example of how the public/private divide structures citizenship across political, economic and intimate domains.

For many women, political citizenship thus extends far beyond the formal right to vote. It depends on whether access to the public sphere is genuinely possible or systematically constrained by social expectations embedded in the private sphere. For example, traditional gender norms and family expectations often restrict women’s participation in the workforce and, sometimes, even education, which in turn affects their ability to fully engage in public and political life. Responsiveness, freedom from gender prejudice, and access to material resources are all shaped by how care and family roles are organized. When political institutions are male-oriented, and engagement presumes income and time, women are frequently excluded.

These political inequalities are intertwined with economic citizenship. Limited access to paid work, public childcare and welfare support reinforces dependence on family structures, while the care work remains invisible in dominant understandings of citizenship. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for unpaid caregiving work leaves them with fewer economic opportunities. This economic dependence does not remain confined to the private sphere; it spills over into political marginalization and constrains autonomy within intimate relationships.

Perhaps the most overlooked, yet most consequential, dimension is intimate citizenship. Control over women’s bodies, relationships and family life shapes whether citizenship feels real. When states treat these subjects as private matters rather than as part of citizenship, they reproduce the public/private divide and allow gendered inequality to persist beyond democratic accountability. Taken together, these dimensions show why formal equality is not enough. Citizenship cannot be reduced to legal status or electoral participation alone; it also depends on the conditions that allow individuals to exercise autonomy and agency.

While our analysis is grounded in the Turkish case, the patterns we identify also reflect broader global dynamics. The gendered dimensions of citizenship are not confined to one country; similar inequalities in political, economic, and intimate realms can be observed worldwide. This highlights the necessity of rethinking citizenship through a gender-mainstreaming lens, a crucial step towards a more inclusive and equitable democracy.

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Image credit: “Cumartesi Anneleri” (Saturday Mothers), Green Left Party (YSP) Congress, October 2023. Photograph by Abdurrahman Antakyalı. Used with permission.

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Read the Identities article:
​​Fernandes, R.S. & Carvalhais, I.E. (2026). From foes to friends? Fighting against women’s ‘half-citizenship’ through gender-mainstreaming citizenship. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2026.2617779. 

Read further in Identities:

Women's Political Consciousness and Empowerment in Local, National, and Transnational Contexts: Guatemalan Refugees and Returnees
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Introducing radical democratic citizenship: from practice to theory   OPEN ACCESS

Active citizenship, dissent and civic consciousness: young Muslims redefining citizenship on their own terms