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

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