Resumen de Penalizing women MPs: the approval of women-initiated bills in the Turkish parliament

Eduardo Alemán, Saadet Konak Unal

• This article examines the effect of female bill authorship on bill approval. Theanalysis focuses on the Turkish Parliament between 2002 and 2015. Duringthis time, the Islamic Justice and Development Party controlled the country’sgovernment and a parliamentary majority, and gender issues became centralto political discourse. Using a novel data set of content-coded privatemembers’ bills, we evaluate whether gender affected bill approval. Theanalysis sheds light on gender discrimination, and the impact women MPshave on the corpus of laws that govern the country. The results reveal thatbills initiated by women did not receive a similar treatment to those initiatedby men. All else equal, these bills were less likely to become law.