THE ISSUE OF WOMEN'S REPRESENTATION IN TURKISH POLITICAL CULTURE: INQUIRY OF JUSTICE IN REPRESENTATION.

Democratization policies in Turkey are implemented on macro levels and mainly argued on the basis of ethnic and class power relations. The nation's democratization efforts do not treat masculine tutelage as a freedom issue. Gender-based power relations are limited with the sub-field of social problems. As democracy and freedom discourses in Turkey have yet to discard their masculine characteristics, the discourse of women is still limited in the family context where modernization is only able to question women's rights and freedoms within the framework of family responsibilities. Thus, it is quite difficult to discuss real modernization in Turkey unless the masculine modernization in the country is not transformed into a multiple modernization. This paper discusses the unjust structure of the political system founded on the gender-based unequal distribution of rights and freedoms and aims to identify the extent of representative injustice using statistical descriptive analysis of qualitative methodology. Its results indicate that, although there is a relative increase in the number of women in the parliament, the percentage of women parliamentarians has yet to reach satisfactory levels. On the basis of these ratios, the universal basic principle of political democracy, justice in representation, is discussed in a twenty-first century perspective and in the context of Turkey's democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]