Gender and political leadership: Turkish experience

Abstract

Women’s political leadership has been ignored both in actual political scene of world’s democracies and by the studies of political leadership. The common perception in both areas has long been that gender difference makes women unfit leaders. More recent studies of gender and leadership as well as various women politicians, on the other hand, emphasized women’s fitness for leadership due to their gendered characteristics. This paper argues that using gender as a determining factor for good or bad political leadership endangers future leadership opportunities for women. An exploration of the experience of Turkey in the 1990s with a woman political leader, Tansu Çiller, and her leadership style in relation to her gender, demonstrates that while gender stereotypes make women’s political leadership to be perceived as ineffective, any argument that is made in its favor in gendered terms faces the risk of being refuted by actual experience hence delegitimizing women’s leadership altogether. Using Crosby and Bryson’s leadership model as an analytical framework to dissect Çiller’s political and ethical leadership and her use of gender in the Turkish context, we can see that gender itself does not make a leader more democratic or ethical and arguing so works against potential women leaders.

Keywords

Political leadership ethical leadership gender Turkey Tansu Çiller

Political leadership studies in the West go back to Plato and Aristotle who inquired into the nature of ideal rulers in an ideal system (Plato, 2004) or categorized political systems (constitutions) according to the number and ethical quality of their political leaders (Aristotle, 1998). Machiavelli, another prominent political theorist of political leadership, also theorized political leadership from a normative perspective in terms of the necessary political skills of a good political leader to exercise power (Machiavelli, 2009). Empirical study of political leadership, with the exception of Max Weber with his typologies of traditional, legal/rational, and charismatic leaders (Weber, 1991), has been rare because political science focused on the necessary structures for the establishment of good society where individual leaders would have a limited role (Blondel, 1987: 41–42) and rational institutions rather than contingent effects of individuals would determine political outcomes (Peele, 2005: 189–190). Later studies took up political leadership as an essential part of understanding government and political outcomes (Burns, 1978; Greenstein, 1988; Jones, 1989; Tucker, 1981) and recently, political science started to focus more on leadership acknowledging the importance of political leaders in political analysis (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011; Helms, 2012a; Peele, 2005). These studies particularly focused on executives (presidential leadership in the United States) and considered leadership as inherently good, i.e. theorizing leadership in connection with morality although more recent scholarship distinguishes political and ethical leadership (Kellerman, 2004; Nye, 2008). Overall, political leadership studies has been extremely “pluralist” in terms of definition, theory, and empirical work (Helms, 2012b: 4) especially because political leadership is extremely “dependent on institutional, cultural and historical contexts and situations” (Masciulli et al., 2009: 4).

Despite this plurality, however, one thing has been constant: either an assumption that political leaders are gendered male or that women’s leadership is constrained by their gender (Sjoberg, 2009: 150–151). Even those studies that try to demonstrate the “fitness” of women for leadership positions emphasized gender as a differentiating characteristic providing advantages this time rather than the disadvantages in the traditional understanding of femininity causing bad leadership skills. Discussing women’s leadership styles within a framework of similarity–difference dichotomy (Eagly et al., 2003; Eagly and Johnson, 1990; Siraj-Blatchford and Manni, 2007; Yukl, 2002; Zenger and Folkman, 2012), most studies maintained that there are clear-cut gender differences in leadership styles, that women are more democratic, for instance, because agentic attributes (being assertive, controlling, and confident) are associated with men and communal attributes (being affectionate, helpful, kind, interpersonally sensitive, and nurturing) with women. Alternatively, some argue that gender influence vanishes in leadership positions because of the authority and clear rules about appropriate behavior in organizational settings (Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001: 783). They end up saying that there is an incongruity between leader roles and women’s gender roles because agentic attributes are associated with good leadership or they put women leaders in a position of impasse where they are perceived to violate their gender role if they fit into the leadership role (Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001: 786). State itself has been the focus of such research as a mechanism that presents traits associated with men as the traits necessary for political governance hence pushing women political candidates for leadership into becoming “hybrid candidates” between man and woman (McDonagh, 2009: 6–7).

Recent scholarship that examines the issue in a different vein trying to go beyond the similarity–difference dichotomy also used gender as a category to take into consideration when studying leadership. By looking at leadership in many different dimensions, namely, task-oriented leadership versus interpersonally oriented leadership, autocratic leadership versus democratic and transformational leadership versus transactional/laissez-faire leadership, they explore the spectrum over which gender effects are detected to differing degrees. These studies also find that depending on the social context, the relationship between gender and leadership varies significantly upsetting all dichotomies. They find, for instance, that gender differences are effective in determining leadership style for task-orientation scale in the laboratory setting, but they disappear in the organizational setting because of the emergence of organizational–managerial constraints (Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001: 786–794).

Political leadership, however, still presents additional difficulties in terms of situating the effect of gender on leadership particularly because in democratic societies, public perceptions play a large role in conceptualizing the relationship between gender and leadership and the expectations from political leaders (especially in confrontational areas such as foreign policy) are still guided by traditional gender stereotypical terms. As a result, in terms of the preference given to characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity and men in determining good political leadership (such as strength, power, rationality, decisiveness, autonomy, independence, determination, and confrontation; Sjoberg, 2009: 154; Sykes, 2009: 219), gender bias is apparent in both public perceptions of how a good leader should be and the scholarly studies of political leadership especially leadership traits and rational actor models (Brams, 1975; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Hermann, 1980; Russett, 1990; Schelling, 1960; Wittman, 1979; Zagare, 1977).

One thing these studies, however, does not take into consideration is the pure effect of bringing in gender as a variable into understanding political leadership at all. Especially at the public level where the decisions for political leaders are made, a gendered lens may be not only inaccurate in describing leadership of particular politicians but also harmful in terms of perpetuating the exclusion of half of the population from leadership positions. The experience of Turkey with a woman political leader, Tansu Çiller, in the 1990s is a good example of this phenomenon where gender proved to be both an invalid category to make a difference in political leadership and a blocking stone for aspiring women to become future leaders. By looking at Tansu Çiller’s rise and time in power, this article argues that emphasizing gender as a characteristic that makes a significant difference in political leadership may prevent the rise of future women leaders for two interconnected reasons. Firstly, as the Çiller example demonstrates, gender itself does not make a difference in creating a different type of leader. Making such a claim (the claim may be made by the political candidate herself/her campaign, supporters, or scholars) may lead to unrealistic expectations and the failures of the leader will ultimately be associated with her gender to affirm the already existing prejudices against women leaders. The roots of this effect can be situated in the second cause of the negative result of emphasizing gender: If one tries to justify women’s political leadership on the basis of their different/superior characteristics by virtue of their gender, the nonexistence of those virtues delegitimizes women’s leadership itself. Women leaders, especially if they are the first women political leaders in their own contexts, will strengthen the symbolic first effect if they emphasize their gender and their mistakes will stick on to their gender (and all members of their gender) stigmatizing potential women leaders. One leader’s mistakes are framed as all women leaders’ mistakes (although a male leader’s mistakes are not labeled as such) casting doubt on all future women leaders in the eyes of the electorate.

Tansu Çiller experience provides a good example of this effect where a political leader, a symbolic first in terms of her gender came to power and stayed in power by emphasizing her gender and blocked the road for future women through her failures. Since every woman who is mentioned for a political leadership position in Turkey is compared with Tansu Çiller (Kalyoncu, 2014) because they are both women, this article explores her leadership style to demonstrate both the nondifference of her leadership from any regular male leadership and how her use of gender worked to stigmatize women’s leadership in general.

Given the scattered landscape with respect to studies of political leadership, it is useful to use the analytical framework provided by Crosby and Bryson, which separates political leadership from ethical leadership (which is valuable from a political science perspective seeing the separation as more objective (Peele, 2005: 197)) while evaluating the specificities of the institutional, cultural, and historical context including the effects of gender in these contexts. Crosby and Bryson’s framework (Crosby and Bryson, 2005) is particularly useful since women’s leadership differences are also studied along these scales, i.e. women being “more democratic leaders” in terms of political leadership and having a different ethical approach (“ethics of care”) in terms of ethical leadership. Some of the common themes identified in political leadership literature will also be explored in each section: the character of the leader, her interaction with her followers, the social and political context in which the interaction occurred, the problems and tasks she faced, the techniques she used to mobilize support, and the ultimate effect of her leadership (Peele, 2005: 192).

After a brief historical overview of her time in power, this paper will first examine Tansu Çiller’s political leadership defined in instrumental terms in a democracy. The meaning of being a political leader, the leadership skills it requires, especially within party politics and Tansu Çiller’s skills and her use of them will be examined. The second section will be on ethical leadership focusing on principles, laws, and norms that are important in political leadership (specifically in the pursuit of power). The section will address the way Çiller’s leadership fits into this legal and moral framework. Thirdly, the way gender plays into leadership opportunities and the way it affects leadership styles and Tansu Çiller’s strategic use of gender (gender and power) as well as her position toward gender issues as part of her leadership style will be explored. Last section will put leadership in context: In light of Turkey’s past political leadership, political ethics and gender perspective how did Çiller rise to power and how did she use the opportunity in terms of prospects for future women political leaders? (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Dimensions of Çiller’s leadership.

	Effectiveness/implementation	Integrity	Context	Long-term consequences/wider social impact
Political leadership	Coalition building, conflict solution (including Kurdish problem), democracy Economy Staying in power	Protecting the secular republic/stopping the rise of fundamentalism	Time of leadership crisis, political and economic crisis, and desperation	Turmoil/military intervention Recurrent economic crises Ultimate rise of Islamist movement
Ethical leadership	Values of intentions and goals: promise of “white page” Means that are used/adherence to rules and laws: The use of deep state, lawlessness Claims of ethics of care because of being a mother	U-turn on electoral promises Deepening corruption No different than male politicians, no sign of an ethics of care, mostly self-interested	Corrupt political environment	Social movement against corruption (“one minute of darkness campaign”) No long-term solution to corruption Ethics of care losing its meaning in the eyes of Turkish electorate
Gender	Making people believe that she would be different/transformative because of her gender Promise of “motherly/sisterly purity” to stay in power	Strategic use of gender Hawkish, corrupt and undemocratic leadership covered by “mother, sister” rhetoric No policies for gender equality	Patriarchal culture and political tradition, but tired of male politicians due to recurrent crises	Delegitimization of women’s political leadership

Çiller in power

1980s and 1990s were tumultuous times in Turkish political history. The military coup of 1980 opened up space for new political actors and new political experiments by excluding old parties and leaders from politics. 1980s, therefore, saw a political system dominated by one political party (Motherland Party of Turgut Özal) and its neoliberal economic policies as well as conservative social policies. These policies gave way to economic liberalization, rising political corruption, and increasing gap between the rich and the poor. The lack of political liberalization apparent in government’s unwillingness to change the military regime’s policies (such as the repression of workers’ rights and the repression of civil rights in general) along with the rise of separatist terrorism in the southeast region toward the end of 1980s created a political climate where a social demand for change in the political leadership started to emerge. Turkey entered the 1990s in an economic bottleneck exacerbated by counterterrorist operations, political instability, repression, and a rising Islamist movement which was feeding on the economic and political corruption of the system as well as the openness of political space regarding distributive justice because of the annihilation of the political left by the 1980 coup. The election of Turgut Özal, the charismatic leader of the center right, to presidency in 1989 weakened his party further since president in the Turkish political system is a symbolic leader without much political power and cannot be affiliated with any political party. In 1990s, center right became divided into two, therefore, one party led by the pre-1980 leader of the right, Süleyman Demirel and other by a young protégée of Özal, Mesut Yılmaz. Starting with the 1991 general elections, a decade of coalition governments started because none of these parties were able to get the majority of the votes to be able to form a government in the Turkish parliamentary system.

In 1993, the president, Turgut Özal died and after the election of the then prime minister Süleyman Demirel to the presidency, Tansu Çiller became the leader of the ruling True Path Party and the prime minister of Turkey. Although she was not elected to the post in a general election but through the party congress, the public was thrilled by a woman’s rise to power. Many people thought that as a young modern leader and an educated woman (an economics professor educated in the United States), she would make a difference diverging “from the old-fashioned and authoritarian male politicians who had dominated the country” (Turkey’s Iron Lady, 1993). As a newcomer to politics (since 1991), her triumph over two male old guards of her party was considered a victory for both women and the new generation desperate to change the face of politics in Turkey from a repressive corrupt politics threatened by the rise of Islamist extremism to a clean, democratic, prosperous, and modern country integrated into the West. Many people from all sides of the political spectrum loved her: she was pretty, educated, self-confident giving bold speeches harshly criticizing former governments’ policies, and proposing radical changes to make things right regarding the most important problems of Turkey, the economy, the Kurdish problem, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. She was wearing white suits in order to look pure and innocent, walking fast to look dynamic, and applying all other tactics she learned from the leadership course she took in New York and from her public relations consultants to give an impression of authority (Reinart, 1999). Her “energetic, often emotional and frequently jingoistic campaign performance” was loved by the masses (Brown, 1994: 56).

She continued to gather considerable support in the first years of her leadership even though she had an abrasive style which caused conflicts with senior bureaucrats such as the central bank governors causing their resignation twice, damaging the country’s creditworthiness and contributing to the serious economic crisis in 1994. Even the accusations that she had used her position to buy property in the US (she had 50 million dollars worth of property most of them being in the US; Brown, 1994: 56) did not prevent her party from emerging as the second largest party in the Parliament in the 1995 elections. Despite continuing scandals such as the revelation of the links she had with organized crime and her coalition making with political Islamists in the way of covering up these scandals which led to her electoral defeat in 1999, she managed to hold on to power as the leader of the party until 2002. Only when her party was left out of the Parliament in the 2002 elections, her political career ended with her resignation.

Political leadership of Çiller

Political leadership is “making and implementing policy decisions in legislative, executive and administrative arenas” (Crosby and Bryson, 2005: 2). A good political leader has to know how to control the agenda, how to act strategically, how to deal with conflicts, and he or she has to be able to negotiate and compromise when necessary in order to build support for policies. Doing these also requires a careful analysis of the stakeholders, as well as an understanding of the power structures and possibilities within which he or she is working (Crosby and Bryson, 2005). These definitions do not make any differentiation between political leaders in terms of their purposes, an issue that I will return in the section on Ethical Leadership of Çiller. They do, however, make references to “good policies” as when they assign political leaders the job of “develop[ing] proposals and coalitions of support that will increase the chances that good policies and plans will ultimately be adopted and implemented” (Crosby and Bryson, 2005: 267) and serving moral purposes, equality, freedom, justice, human rights, and dignity rather than their self-interests (Masciulli et al., 2009: 9). What a good policy is a controversial subject. Was the attempt by the Çiller government to end terrorism, for instance, by using illegal counterterrorist tactics “good policy?” Was it serving public interest? Was it an example of good political leadership?

Furthermore, the traits that are used to come to power and promote these policies can be controversial. Is lying and deceiving the public in order to promote a particular policy (which may incidentally be in public interest) a good political leadership trait or are “honesty, reliability, trustworthiness, fairness” necessary leadership characteristics (Masciulli et al., 2009: 10)? Using different schemes, for instance, for policy adoption, providing people with familiar emotional symbols to get the desired reaction should be construed as “good” leadership skills rather than as manipulation for achieving the desired outcome for the stakeholders a political leader is representing. Political strategy of the winners of political leadership, then, is “set[ting] up the situation in such a way that other people will want to join them …: structuring the world so you can win” (Riker, 1986). Winning and staying in power in order to be able to implement the policies on one’s agenda are necessary qualifications of a political leader in a purely instrumental understanding of political leadership.

What kind of qualifications and characteristics help a political leader to come to power and stay in power, then, are some important concerns in the political leadership literature which go back to Ancient Greek philosophers and still popular topics in the study of executive leadership. Good leaders, according to many philosophical and historical depictions as well as trait theories, are men who are strong-willed, ambitious, energetic, motivated, power-seeking, strategic, and result-oriented (Bennis, 1999; Sadler, 2003). Rational actor models, for instance, envision autonomous and competitive leaders constantly calculating in pursuit of power and self-interest (Bell, 2014; Edinger, 1990; Frohlich et al., 1971). Effective leaders pursue political power through gaining and retaining public office to promote certain policies and serve the interests of either the public (“public-spirited leaders”) or their own supporters (“self-serving leaders”) (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003).

The typologies of political leadership including instrumental understandings of good and bad leadership (as framed by rational actor models that can be called effective and ineffective leadership) will be explored in this section, while the normative typologies regarding the leader’s goals’ and methods’ goodness will be dealt in the next section on Ethical Leadership of Çiller. The ultimate measure of leadership in political leadership literature, i.e. “wider social impact and long-range consequences of leadership” as well as the role of political leaders in creating meaning (Kellerman, 2004; Masciulli et al., 2009: 19) will be examined throughout the article especially when it comes to the impact of Çiller’s leadership on the long-term prospects for women’s leadership in Turkey.

Was Hitler or Stalin a good leader? That is a question with which the scholars of political leadership have struggled. They certainly were effective in terms of keeping themselves in power and furthering their agendas although their agendas were highly questionable in terms of their “goodness” (Kellerman, 2004: 29–32). On the other hand, these highly effective leaders, independent of the ethical aspects of their agendas, ended up leading their countries into ruin and collapse (although it happened much later in Stalin’s case). Even when we stripe the good leadership model from its normative content and look at it purely in terms of effectiveness, i.e. the ability to come to power, stay in power, secure followership, and further one’s agenda in terms of policy adoptions, “wider social impact and long-range consequences” should also be taken into consideration.¹

Looking at Tansu Çiller’s political leadership, therefore, within the framework of instrumental goodness and effectiveness of leadership, requires a focus on two aspects of her time in power as well as the wider consequences and long-term effects of her leadership on the country: the policy changes she wanted to adopt as a public-spirited leader, the issue of staying in power as a self-serving leader, a purpose for the stakeholders in her party and herself, and then the consequences of her leadership for the country (which will partly be addressed under the section on Gender, Leadership, and Çiller). Since an evaluation of good political leadership requires an understanding of the “institutional, cultural and historical contexts and situations” (Masciulli et al., 2009: 4) and a deeper examination of the possibilities for particular policy changes serving the public, what public good is, and the incentives for being public-spirited or self-serving in that system, a separate analysis will be made on the specificities of the Turkish context. For the purposes of evaluating Çiller’s political leadership, therefore, one needs to focus on the instrumental effectiveness of the leader in terms of gaining power and keeping it through a mixture of different tactics (what Nye calls “smart power”; Nye, 2008) and the ability of the leader to further his or her agenda, that is to “diagnose problems, prescribe solutions, and mobilize followers to implement policies” (Masciulli et al., 2009: 15).

The major policies Çiller had promised before she came to power were implementation of economic reforms and prevention of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (Brown, 1994: 60). They were both very complicated problems involving many stakeholders and she needed a strong basis of support to solve them. At first she seemed capable of coalition building by retaining control over the parliament and her party. She could even keep the coalition government with the social democrats together through the leadership change in that party (Bodgener, 1993). Soon, however, the process of the gradual loss of the support of the bureaucracy, business, press, her own party, and ultimately the military and the people started.

Her failures began with her lack of political leadership skills in terms of dealing with conflicts and various factions within the government structure by negotiation, compromise, and building support. Firstly, she quarrelled with two central bank governors “as much over personality as policy differences” (Brown, 1994: 60). The fights with bureaucrats affected business so badly that private sector began to criticize her. The economy started going down fast, inflation skyrocketed (Bardach, 1997: 17). The political turmoil also led to the “worst labour unrest since the 1970s” as salaries melted and the prime minister did nothing but accuse previous governments rather than assuming responsibility and taking risks (Bodgener, 1995: 2; Cizre, 2002b: 209–210). The economics professor who rose to power by criticizing the economic policies of the previous governments and with the promise of “two keys” (one for a house and one for a car) for everyone as the symbol of prosperity led the country into a devastating economic crisis in 1994 and the resulting austerity package she had to implement included devaluation, massive rise in prices (up to 100%), and thousands of layoffs which hurt the masses (Klenke, 2004: 226). At this juncture, in its need for money, Çiller government’s relationship with mafia took new turns. Through confiscation of valuable lands from people with old titles to the land for reselling those to the mafia as well as through land speculation, the government and the Çiller family tried to make money (Anderson, 1994). In the middle of economic hardships and increasing illegality, Çiller era was starting to become something far from one of prosperity; rather it was fast becoming an era of exposition of the “dangerous fault lines in the Turkish state” (Bodgener, 1995).

With regard to Çiller’s second promise, the prevention of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, she started with favorable leadership skills in terms of using her policy promises to mobilize support behind her, but ultimately could not prevent the tide to turn against herself. Before the 1995 general elections, her way of framing the issue was addressing the Islamist Welfare Party as “dark forces” (Welfare State: Turkey, 1996), demonizing its leader (Bardach, 1997: 17) and describing any alliance with him as “plunging the country into darkness” (Usher, 1996). She was, however, in her search for the votes of the conservative electorate, using religion herself through the “most shameless symbolism” putting on a headscarf or wrapping the Koran in the Turkish flag during her election campaign (Bardach, 1997: 18). After the elections, staying in power especially to evade the corruption charges against herself, dominated Çiller’s agenda. First she made a coalition government with the other center-right party, the Motherland Party. When the Islamist Welfare Party pushed for a parliamentary investigation into the corruption allegations about her, which could lead to the lifting of her immunity hence prosecution, however, her coalition partner supported the investigation to crush her and her party and become the leader of the center right. That move made Çiller desperate and she made a “Faustian” pact with the Islamists: she would carry them to power and in return they would block the vote in the parliament which was going to send her to the Constitutional Court to be prosecuted for corruption (Ciller’s Life-Raft: Turkey, 1996: 49; Massicard, 2010: 47; Welfare State: Turkey, 1996: 46). While her coalition building with the Welfare Party could have been regarded as an example of the political leadership skill of the ability to “bargain, negotiate, coalesce and compromise when necessary,” the fact that she was doing this U-turn just to hold on to power rather than pushing any policy agenda did not reflect well upon her. Her behavior was described as “lust for command” rather than a moderating style (Arat, 2002: 96). Her alliance with the “dark forces” in her own words was nothing but a blow to the image she wanted to create in front of both Turkey and the rest of the world. The appearance of the educated, westernized woman political leader who was supposed to be progressive ensuring the Republic’s survival as a western-oriented project was seriously damaged (Brown, 1994: 60). She tried to carry on the facade by pretending to hold the Islamic threat at bay (her justification attempt for the coalition) and pushing for further integration with the West through her actions as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The figure she carried to power, Erbakan, however, as the “head of the first Islamist-majority coalition government in Turkey since Kemal Atatürk declared it a secular state in 1923” had other plans (Usher, 1996: 53). Policy propositions such as pulling Turkey out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and membership bid for the European Union, forming alliances with Muslim countries and allowing women to wear headscarf at government offices and schools were regarded as the first signs of Islamization (Bardach, 1997: 17). Çiller did not even criticize his agenda, rather the coalition government continued as a fragmented bunch each partner pursuing their own policies separately (Kaarbo, 2012: 209–210).

Meanwhile, Çiller also began to lose support of her own party members, who were at first happy about the coalition since it provided them with opportunities for furthering their own political careers as well as wealth accumulation and patronage. They started to raise their voices which had been suppressed by her personal and antidemocratic leadership before (Cizre, 2002b: 209). Social unrest was also ravelling as, for the first time in Turkish Republic’s history, the business associations and labour unions were coming together to issue a joint statement against the government. Turkish Army, which assumed itself the defender of the secular Republic, also started to raise its voice firing “warning shots” against the government (Ciller’s Life-Raft: Turkey, 1996: 49). In February 1997, a military memorandum was issued in a postmodern coup d’état forcing the coalition government to resign. According to Bardach, although the military was responding to Welfare Party’s Islamization policies, “Tansu Çiller – the singularly ambitious, pathologically duplicitous former prime minister whose craven deal-making with the fundamentalists precipitated the whole crisis in the first place” (Bardach, 1997: 16). Whether or not she precipitated the crisis, it is clear that she did not handle the political situation (just as her handling of the economy) very well pushing the country into the cycle of economic and political misrule leading to military rule, which causes even more deterioration (Brown, 1994: 57).

Despite the political losses she faced after she was forced out of power through the 1997 military intervention, Çiller staged another political attack in 1999 when she decided to support the leftist minority government in return for various concessions including the deposition of the strictly secularist Minister of Education, Hikmet Uluğbay (Çiller Kabineyi Deldi, 1999; Kinzer, 1999). The once secularist woman leader who described Islamist political movements as “the murderous merchants of religion” (Reinart, 1999) and vowed to stop the Islamist threat in Turkey was now playing the leading role in the political commercialization of religion. In order to be able to claim the votes of the conservative Muslim electorate, she was not shying away from anti-secularist discourse just like she did not shy away from carrying Islamists to government in order to cover up her corruption.

Çiller’s political leadership has been one of mixed success. In terms of the problems she diagnosed and the solutions she tried to implement, she failed. Her term as a prime minister witnessed one of the worst economic crisis in Turkish history: inflation rose to 106%, Turkish currency crashed, the Central Bank lost half of its reserves, and the economy contracted by 6% as a result of her major policy mistakes both as a minister of economics and a prime minister (Celasun, 1999; The World Bank, n.d.). The deaths resulting from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) terrorism and the counterterrorist operations of the government almost tripled under her administration (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1996) and the Islamists whom she vowed to stop finally came to power with her help.

In terms of staying in power and keeping her followership intact as well as avoiding legal processes that would cost her both leadership and her private gains though she was successful. Her evasive manoeuvres as a rational actor keeping her and her followers in power (and out of jail) demonstrated her ability as a good political leader, while her failure in terms of adopting the policy changes she saw as solutions to Turkey’s problems proved to be disappointing. Her insistent search for power sacrificed her policy agenda and eventually eroded the initial popular support she got with her leadership style which resulted in the disappearance of her party from the Turkish political scene. The demise was ultimately a result of her failure in ethical leadership, which caused the rifts in her political leadership.

Ethical leadership of Çiller

Crosby and Bryson define ethical leadership as “sanctioning conduct, adjudicating disputes and managing residual conflict in courts,” and it involves understanding ethics, laws and norms, constitutions, courts, educating others about these and promoting awareness of how to adapt ethical principles, laws, and norms to changing times while resolving conflicts among principles, laws, and norms (Crosby and Bryson, 2005: 143–146). Other scholars define it as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct” (Brown et al., 2005: 120) where the content of the appropriate or “good” conduct is rather relative. The discussion about what is “good” comes into play, therefore, and in the context of political leadership ethical rightness of the policies pursued by a political leader as well as the ways in which he or she pursues them are questioned. Are the ends and means of the leader conforming to ethical principles, laws, and norms?

There are three dimensions of ethical leadership that the political leadership literature explores: The values of intentions and goals, the ethical quality of the means that are used to pursue these goals (which include not cheating, lying, or stealing as corrupt leaders would do (Kellerman, 2004: 44)), and the consequences of these actions for the leader’s group and outsiders (serving the common good/greatest good (Ciulla, 2004) rather than self-interest which is defined as corrupt leadership by Kellerman (2004: 44; Nye, 2008: 112)).

One aspect of the discussion of ethical leadership relevant for our purposes is an understanding that takes gender into consideration. Scholars have argued that a gender-sensitive perspective on ethics does not link ethics strictly to universal and impartial rules (norms, laws, and principles), but to caring since social relations in which we are placed are not universal and impartial (Bowden, 1997: 5). What is expected from a leader in terms of ethical leadership, therefore, changes when a gender-sensitive perspective is adopted bringing in something more than mere adherence to rules. The intentions and goals of the leader, the ethical quality of the means he or she uses, and the consequences of his or her actions are also affected by gender lenses.

In the case of Tansu Çiller, we find the facade of both understandings of ethics and the substance of neither. What we see, in fact, is a clear violation of the principles of the classical definition of ethical leadership which she tried to cover up by an appeal to a different gender-sensitive ethics of care. While she was trying to distinguish herself from her unethical predecessors, she used her gender to emphasize that she was different from them because she was a woman who was pure and caring. We have to recognize that the political context in which Çiller found herself was far from an ethical environment. The previous governments were also charged with various forms of corruption, fictitious export scandals, and unsolved murders and the state was buried deep into corruption while no politician was being prosecuted because of parliamentary immunity² (Hiçyılmaz, 2009). Groups both inside and outside the state were formed benefiting from the corruption hence the political surroundings and the closest followers of leaders were expecting from the leader the continuation of the previous unethical practices. Mehmet Ağar, for instance, had been active in the Turkish deep state way before Çiller’s entrance to politics, but afterward became her follower with the expectation that she would support the same policies. The social role expectations by many of the followers, therefore, cannot be ignored in the making of an unethical leader (Hoyt et al., 2013) in terms of adopting unethical goals or using unethical means besides the leader’s personality traits as being selfish or inherently corrupt.

The fact that Çiller came to power with the promise of ending it all, the expectations on the part of a large portion of the population from her to be a clean leader were also there. Simola et al. demonstrate that people perceive those leaders using an ethic of care as transformational meaning a leadership that produces transformation in the conduct and ethics of everyone (Simola et al., 2010). Çiller’s use of a gendered language based on ethics of care was particularly influential, therefore, in convincing people of her claims regarding bringing about real change, turning the corrupt system into an ethical one.

When Çiller first became the prime minister in 1993, she promised a “white (blank) page” to people who were tired of the corrupt governments. Her initial goals and intentions had ethical value: she was going to ensure economic prosperity, secular liberalization, and an end to violence in the Kurdish-populated southeast region. “White page” symbolized the alleged purity of her government which also had gender-specific connotations. She was claiming that she was not like the others who were pretending to abide by the rules while lacking integrity. Her discourse emphasized her integrity and based that integrity on her gender: She was not self-interested like her male counterparts giving up integrity for political and personal gain because she was a mother caring and nurturing whose interest is in caring for the people (Bardach, 1997: 18). “White page” represented a different kind of ethics, an ethics of motherly purity, for the political world. Similar to many women leaders, she tried to create a political identity predicated on purity as opposed to men who tend to think of politics as the art of the possible (Liswood, 1995: 93). She associated the corruption of the previous male leaders with “archaic values,” promised to leave them behind and bring in new, young, and dynamic cadres with new values. She promised, for example, a new approach to the Kurdish question, more open democratic (“caring”) policies such as education in Kurdish rather than the militaristic approach of previous governments. Later, however, the substance of her goals and the means that she used for them changed. In 1994, she had pro-Kurdish party’s members of parliament arrested and harsh counterterrorist measures were implemented along with an ultranationalist discourse (Kirişçi and Winrow, 1997). In 1995 elections, for example, she chose people from the old cadres such as former police chiefs, governors, and bureaucrats as candidates for the parliament (Cizre, 2002b: 203).

The inconsistencies in the discourses she used and her actions, the scandals indicating her corruption, and illegal connections and the events that demonstrated her personality flaws of being “a liar, unfaithful and unreliable” (Cizre, 2002b: 206) did not prevent people from believing in her “pure” image. Her Machiavellianism was apparent in her actions and she would use all the “dirty linen on other politicians” so as to cover up her own dirty linen (Reinart, 1999) helping her to keep her clean image for a long time.

People believed Çiller. The corruption charges against her, for instance, about using her position to buy property in the United States did not affect the electorate much in the 1994 municipal elections that her party got the majority of the vote (Brown, 1994: 55–56). Even the later charges about her handling of government procurements in the energy sector, manipulation of government contracts, and the irregularities in the privatization of state-owned shares in a company (Hunt the Lady: Turkey, 1996: 56; Kinzer, 1997b) did not prevent her from coming second after the Islamist Welfare Party in the 1995 general elections. How did she cover up her unethical leadership behavior and convinced the electorate to vote for a prime minister deep in corruption? Throughout the election campaign, she introduced herself as the “mother of all Turks” (Bardach, 1997: 18) and asked people to vote for their mother and sister.

While the issue of her use of gender will be dealt with in the next section, her way of presenting herself as the possessor of a special ethical aura because of her femininity and motherhood is striking. It is a common perception that women are more ethical in terms of their “intentions, judgments and behaviours” although studies show that in this masculine sense of ethics, there is no significant difference between men and women (Dalton and Ortegren, 2011). Rather, some scholars argued, the difference is in the way women approach to ethics, a framing of ethics in terms of caring rather than deciding and behaving according to ethical principles (Jaggar, 1994; Noddings, 1984). Although some feminists caution against tying ethics of care to motherhood because of its essentialist underpinnings, others, probably along with the common public, also emphasized mothering as the source of care ethics (Held, 2006; Ruddick, 1989).

Tansu Çiller played on this connection between mothering and ethics in order to legitimize her unethical behavior (in every sense of the word). She was, for instance, trying to cover up her unethical connections with the mafia and the illegal counterterrorist structures within the state committing extrajudicial killings through the use of a nationalist discourse emphasizing her caring role as the protective mother of the nation. She was trying to justify the illegal (hence unethical) actions of the killers her illegal (and unethical) association with them by saying “both those who shoot bullets and get shot by the bullets in the name of the state are honourable persons. They all are heroes” (Cizre, 2002b: 205; Tansu Çiller: Devlet Uğruna Kurşun Atan da Yiyen de Şereflidir, 1996). As the caring “mother” of the Turkish nation and the Turkish state, she was presenting her unethical leadership conduct in standard definitions as ethical because it should be portrayed, in her justification, as the caring actions of a mother. Just like a mother who would kill to defend her child she was allowing the extrajudicial killings to defend the Turkish nation and as a political strategy she was playing a mind trick to depict the killings as protective behavior motivated by an “unselfish concern for the nation” (Cizre, 2002b: 207).

Her discourse which worked on the electorate for some time started to lose their appeal after the 1995 general elections. Her ethical defects, which started to surface even before 1995, became very obvious after the elections as her credibility sank into the ground (Cizre, 2002b: 205). In her attempt to avoid parliamentary investigations into the corruption allegations regarding privatization of state-owned enterprises and the use of discretionary funds during her tenure as prime minister (which could bring her to the Constitutional Court for prosecution), she did the unthinkable: She formed a coalition government with Erbakan, the leader of the Islamist Welfare Party whom she had demonized during her election campaign calling her the country’s biggest thief (facing a corruption investigation himself) and the murderous merchant of religion (Bardach, 1997: 17; Reinart, 1999). Her intentions and goals at this point became avoiding investigation into her political conduct by holding on to political power. The means she used in this vein was also lacking in ethical quality: she was cooperating with another political leader facing similar corruption charges. The new government immediately struck down the investigations into the corruption charges against both Çiller and Erbakan who were accusing each other of dishonesty just a few months before (Meyer, 1999: 491–492). Çiller’s move to stay in power and avoid prosecution proved, in the public eye, that she had no integrity, that she did not care about the country, but herself and that her loyalties were fickle (Bardach, 1997: 19). She was, therefore, not fitting into the framework of the pure caring mother. She was also afraid of facing the law, thus not fitting into the framework of a classical ethical leader.

What happened in late 1996 further demonstrated the public that Çiller’s unethical leadership in terms of working within the bounds of ethical and legal principles using ethical means to further ethical goals was highly questionable. A car crash near the town Susurluk exposed the links between Turkish government, mafia, and illegal counterterrorist activities. A member of the parliament from Çiller’s party, a former officer from government antiterrorist team, a right-wing assassin and heroin smuggler wanted by the Interpol and protected through government-issued false passports as well as several weapons and silencers that belonged to the Turkish Ministry of Interior were found in the same car. The Minister of Interior from Çiller’s party resigned, but Çiller and her coalition government with Erbakan protected these members of the Parliament from Çiller’s party connected to the event and blocked investigations. Through her behavior Çiller effectively placed herself within the crime web (Turkish “deep state”) which shed a light on several illegal actions from the mysterious killings of Kurdish activists and sympathizers to coup attempts abroad committed by this web during her rule as prime minister (Cizre, 2002b: 205; Gunter, 2003; Kinzer, 1997a; Meyer, 1999: 493–496; The Turkish Underworld, 1998).

What ultimately destroyed the image Çiller created for herself as an ethical leader (with ethics of a mother) was the demonstration of her lack of integrity. Integrity is a very important part of understanding ethical leadership. For a leader to be considered “morally trustworthy,” committing to certain principles and values in line with his or her identity and consistently acting on them are important facets of moral integrity and ethical leadership (Bauman, 2013: 419–420). While Çiller’s involvement in the counterterrorist policies and corruption scandals were ethical failures at a personal level (authorizing murder or stealing as immoral acts in themselves), her basic failure was her lack of leadership integrity: that the values and principles (and policies) she committed to such as being clean, modern, and secular were not part of her identity and she did not consistently act on them. Her collaboration with the Islamists in particular was such a demonstration of lack of integrity both showing her willingness to act in an unprincipled manner for political gain and her desperation to suppress the corruption investigations about her conduct that finally delegitimized her leadership.

In the public eye, this lack of integrity proved her unethical leadership and a civil society campaign started in February 1997 to end political corruption. Millions of people began to turn off the lights of their homes every night at 9 p.m. to protest corruption (“A minute’s darkness for permanent light”), especially the one regarding the ties between mafia and the state, and call for the prosecution of everyone involved. It is estimated that over 30 million people participated over months making it the biggest civil activity in recent Turkish history (Corby, 2011).

The consequences of Çiller’s actions for her followers including her party and the Turkish people who expected her to fulfil her promises were also disastrous: Her party was first left out of the Parliament and then erased from Turkish political scene; the vacuum left in the center right of the political spectrum by the erosion of her party was filled by political Islamists (whom she carried on to the stage in the first place) and the country was pushed into another cycle of military intervention, political, and ultimately economic crisis in early 2000s.

Although her ethical leadership understood both in the classical sense of principle-based conduct and in the sense of gender-sensitive care ethics was a miserable failure, Çiller managed to stay in power for another six years as the leader of her party. Throughout her political life, one of the things that helped her was her strategic use of gender, which needs to be explored.

Gender, leadership, and Çiller

Feminist scholars often criticize political leadership literature because the so-called feminine characteristics are usually not valued and called for in many situations (Sjoberg, 2014: 78). The case of Tansu Çiller’s political leadership, however, provides an interesting example of how the particularities of the Turkish context in the 1990s redefined the characteristics of a good leader creating opportunities for a woman leader to rise to power. While the odds are stacked against women because of patriarchal societies’ value systems where masculinity and traditionally masculine attributes are considered to be leader-like characteristics (political leaders as “great men” (Byman and Pollack, 2001) rather than great men and women), where “masculinism is deeply embedded in the institutions, ideology and political development of … nations” (Sykes, 2009: 220) and where people attach different meanings to men and women’s leadership (Hogue and Lord, 2007), specific contexts may produce specific ideal leadership models. Some theories acknowledge that different contexts may make different leadership traits favored depending on the most pressing needs of the public. Using the situational theories of leadership (Hersey and Blanchard, 1969), political context is taken as a structural variable calling for different traits in “good leaders” under different circumstances (Gill, 2006). Given that social and political context is an important determinant of the ways in which gender and leadership styles interact and the kind of leadership that is favored by the public, Turkish context, and its impact on Çiller’s leadership will be examined under a separate heading after a brief description of Çiller’s style.

Tansu Çiller was a pragmatic leader appropriating and adopting “male marks of leadership and cultural codes representing women” in any way that would help her to hold on to power (Arat, 1998: 12–14). In Cizre’s words “[her] drive for political power was … wrapped up in an awareness on her part of her gender difference from the bulk of Turkish politicians and in her determination to use it to her political advantage” (Cizre, 2002b: 206). She was more agentic and autocratic than many of her male counterparts, for instance, using the exact same tactics for control in her party as male party leaders (“co-optation, divide and rule and expulsion”) but she also claimed to be categorically different from the self-interested male politicians because of her kindness, sensitivity, and nurturing capacity determined to solve people’s problems as an affectionate mother (Cizre, 2002a: 95–96, 2002b: 206–207; Kesgin, 2012: 39).

After she became the prime minister in June 1993, Çiller first tried to legitimize her authority by fitting in the “traditional male coding of leadership” with its body language, gestures, and assertiveness (Arat, 1998: 9–12). She used an authoritative style establishing personal and antidemocratic control over the party (Arat, 1998: 13; Cizre, 2002b: 209). She also adopted a hypermasculine, ultranationalist–militarist attitude on national security issues such as the fight against PKK terrorism or the Kardak Crisis with Greece. She was emphasizing nationalist–chauvinistic themes frequently using a language of force (“acting, breaking, demolishing”) and threatening with or actually implementing the use of military force at every opportunity (Cizre, 2002b: 202; Kesgin, 2012: 42–43; Ms. Ciller Troubles the Waters, 1996).

She also wanted to use her femininity without suffering the costs of “identification with the conventional image of women as feeble, unable to think big, indecisive and timid” (Cizre, 2002b: 206). Çiller, therefore, strategically constructed a novel feminine image for herself: She was not the Republic’s asexual professional woman in the dark suit; she wore white suits, makeup, had a feminine posture and walk, smiled a lot, and she did not avoid physical contact with her male colleagues (Arat, 1998: 14). She also appropriated the metaphors of maternity and sisterhood (“ana” and “bacı”) in order to project an image of unselfishness, protectiveness, other-regarding purity, and honor in opposition to the corrupt male politicians (Arat, 1998: 17; Cizre, 2002b: 207). While the metaphor of maternity would whitewash her corruption and hawkish politics in the public eye, it would also provide her with a special authority—mother’s authority over her children—that men cannot establish. Given the special status of mothers in Turkish society, especially those mothers with adult sons, who enjoy a great deal of moral authority and control within the family through the labor and debt owed to them by their sons (Kandiyoti, 1988; White, 2004: 84–85), it is not surprising to find Çiller use the mother image to her advantage in her pursuit of power. Thanks to this usage, she could exercise real power over the “conservative, moustached-men” (Arat, 1998: 13) of her party while making the Turkish society believe that her swerves were in fact well-meaning affectionate behaviors of a mother which may hurt, but may not allow you to blame her for that. Her use of the image of sister (“bacı” as it is used in Turkish which has a connotation of “honourable” and “untouchable” (Cizre, 2002b: 207)) was also significant in shielding her from political attacks. She was, in fact, accepted as a mother and a sister to such an extent that when she was harassed by the male leaders of other parties during a televised debate before the 1995 general elections, she gained lots of sympathy although her performance was rated as poor (Arat, 1998: 17).

Çiller, therefore, was successful to a great extent in becoming the seemingly pure, self-sacrificing, honorable, and untouchable mother and sister of many Turkish men. Another important question though, about her gender and her leadership, is her relationship with Turkish women. One of the most important reasons for encouraging more women to get involved in politics is the idea that women can understand women’s issues better because of their specific experiences and points of view (Liswood, 1995). Tansu Çiller’s leadership not only discredited women’s leadership as a dynamo for transformation in general but also discredited this idea that women’s leadership is better to solve women’s issues. Instead of owning women’s issues, she said that “she would not assume a special mission for women, [that] they had to learn how to use their existing rights; that she would not rock the boat in the family and challenge the traditional division of labour between men and women, [that] she considered herself equal to men in the public realm, [y]et in the private realm … she claimed her husband to be the head of their household” (Arat, 1998: 10). She was also unwilling to recruit women to important positions, initiate legal changes to improve women’s status or enhance public discourse on gender issues (Arat, 1998: 10), and her gender sensitivity did not go beyond what had instrumental value for her power position (such as putting on the lists some women candidates in parliamentary elections to gather women’s votes) (Narli, 2007: 89).

Not only Çiller disowned women’s issues, she also carried a party threatening the social and political status of women to government despite her election campaign promises to women of being the guarantor of their rights under secularism in Turkey. In their disappointment with her, several women’s organizations sued Çiller for leading “to the emergence of the belief that women would be inconsistent and unsuccessful in politics” (Arat, 1998: 18).

Her leadership, therefore, was transformative (Burns, 1978) (or rather “creative” since there was no previous woman leader with an image to be transformed) in the sense that it effected Turkish people’s vision of what a woman political leader would look like. The transformation, unfortunately, occurred not toward inspiring the people “to a new plane of action” (Peele, 2005: 197) where more women’s political leadership is accepted and valued but in the opposite direction. In the minds of many Turkish people, Turkey’s first (and only as of 2015) woman prime minister did not act any different than her male counterparts as a result of her gender. She was neither more democratic nor more caring/ethical. She did not spend any time or energy to improve women’s standing in society or politics. Her gender was just an extra tool in her possession that could be used to stay in power as it was convenient in playing the “men’s game” (Ağduk, 2009: 321). What allowed her to play these games was the particular context in which she was situated.

Gender, leadership, and the Turkish context

The context in which a leader emerges makes leadership possible or impossible in its different forms since the way people perceive a particular leader and his or her behavior depends on their specific understandings set by their political, social, economic, and cultural environment. Leaders must have the ability to adapt to this context in order to be able to work effectively and present themselves with the knowledge of the perceptions of the people around them in mind. This “behavioural flexibility,” however, as a requirement of leadership in context should not turn into “opportunism and lack of a moral compass” where the leader gives up his or her core values since sustaining one’s integrity is also a necessary condition of being an effective leader (Crosby and Bryson, 2005: 57).

Turkish society’s perception of Tansu Çiller as a woman leader rather than just another leader was ready to be built from the beginning because of the patriarchal nature of Turkish culture. A woman leader was going to be perceived as a woman first. This perception was consolidated first by Çiller herself who used her gender to stay in power and also by the media which framed her first and foremost as a woman both when praising her and attacking her (Demirkürek, 2011). Gender in the Turkish context, therefore, worked to help Çiller in the short run by providing her with behavioral flexibility (which she turned into opportunism) despite her failures while it ended up delegitimizing women’s leadership in the long run by stigmatizing future women leaders. What were the characteristics of the Turkish context, especially with respect to gender, that created Çiller and how did she work with it?

Turkey, as the only example of democratic secularism in the Muslim world, was the product of the Republican project established in 1923. The Republic wanted to be part of the western world by creating a modern, secular nation-state and it ascribed women the mission of representing the face of modernity in Turkey. Women, therefore, automatically became a symbol for the opponents of the Republic as well where gender became one of the battlegrounds between the pro and anti-forces of modernity/westernization in Turkey (Arat, 1997). The Republican regime wanted to facilitate the transition to modernity by encouraging women’s equal participation in public life although this encouragement did not include their full-fledged participation in the political realm. Çiller’s rise to political power, therefore, was very important in terms of carrying the project of modernity one step further toward its logical conclusion, to the point that Turkey has aspired to be (Phillips, 1993).

While Tansu Çiller represented the perfect candidate for the position as a western-educated modern woman seemingly promoting secularism, as a result of her being a married woman with children she also fitted the predominantly conservative character of Turkish society (Phillips, 1993: 26). Thanks to her positioning within the Turkish context, therefore, with its contradictions and ebbs and flows between tradition and modernity, Çiller could use liberal, secular discourse along with religious, conservative, and nationalist discourse in her search for power capturing support from all segments of society (Yıldız, 2002: 123).

Another characteristic of the Turkish context, the presence of “populist politicians [with] a habit of succumbing to corruption scandals” (Brown, 1994: 55), also helped Çiller. Being accustomed to populism and corruption, Turkish people did not discredit her leadership even after her scandals. The fact that her husband was playing a considerable role in these scandals also helped since he covered up for her and allowed her to keep her pure image as a woman in white suits.

In the end, what brought the end of Çiller’s political career was another item specific to the Turkish political context, the role of military in Turkish politics. Throughout her tenure as the prime minister, she completely conceded to the military both in terms of its involvement in politics and its counterterrorist measures, praising Turkish army as the guarantor of democracy in Turkey (Cizre, 2002b: 209; Kesgin, 2012: 40). While this attitude benefited her in terms of providing her with a masculine image and support from nationalist segments of the society, it exploded in her hands in 1997 during her coalition with the Islamist Welfare Party. The military, self-righteous in its attitude as the guardian of the unitary, secular Turkish Republic, empowered by the previous coups and previous governments’ provision of a free hand in politics, forced the coalition government to resign. Her image, which was already damaged by her collaboration with the Islamists, suffered even more. As the political figure that appeared as dragging the country into another political crisis just to hold on to power, Çiller lost her popularity forever. Her party lost considerable support in the 1999 general elections and left out of Parliament in 2002 which brought the end of Çiller’s political career.

In the 11 years that Tansu Çiller was in Turkish politics, she created a leadership style by blending stereotypical masculine and feminine characteristics and using gender in a such a strategic manner that she managed to stay in power despite her recurring failures as a political and ethical leader.

What have been the long-term consequences or the legacy of her political leadership? Social psychological studies demonstrate that people process information through confirmation bias, i.e. “seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis” (Nickerson, 1998: 175), which means their prejudices, including racial or gender biases, influence the way they interpret events including political events. Stereotyping, particularly gender stereotyping, is a common trait leading people to believe in made-up correlations between membership to a group (racial, ethnic, religious, or gender) and particular behaviors (Nickerson, 1998: 183). Biases are activated when people of a particular (stereotyped) group are perceived to fail and others selectively associate the failure with the race, gender, or sexuality of the person (Kark and Eagly, 2010; Whitley Jr. and Kite, 2009: 135). These biases also affect voters in ways that make them generalize the abilities, successes, and failures of leaders in association with their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender (Klenke, 2011; Parks and Rachlinski, 2008). “Symbolic firsts” are important for people in terms of solidifying their prejudices or changing them. If, for instance, the United States President Obama’s presidency came to be regarded as a failure, people worry that it will be seen as “a symbol of black failure” (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2013: 197) (although no White president’s failure is considered to be “white failure”).

The fact that Tansu Çiller was a “symbolic first” in a male-dominated political culture and environment is significant, therefore, in the sense that her success and failure would have been interpreted in association with her gender. Her use of gender as an important defining characteristic of her leadership further exacerbated this trend by making people see her as a woman leader before anything else. The result was the creation of a particular meaning for women’s political leadership in Turkey by Çiller herself, confirmation biases of the Turkish people and the other political actors including the media: That women are not any different from men in terms of being better, more ethical, and democratic leaders and that they may even be worse, manipulative (a general stereotype about women using their sex), irrational, and ineffective (failing in the policy arenas).

Conclusion

The world has not seen many women leaders. In the year 2015, there are only 10 women heads of state and 14 women heads of government in the world (Facts and Figures: Leadership and Political Participation, 2015). Especially in democracies, where leaders are elected by the people, why do women political leaders lag behind? Is it because they are potentially worse political leaders due to their gender or is it because of the gender bias against women? If it is the second, what is the remedy to open up the channels for a more egalitarian world? Turkish example demonstrates that the remedy is not in an emphasis on gender as a positive characteristic for better leadership to refute the gender bias. This is not only because such a positive association does not exist but also any attention drawn on gender ultimately works against women.

In the 1990s, a Turkish woman had the opportunity to lead the country which was tired of decades of political turmoil created by old male politicians. People wanted change and a young woman became the hope for such a change (Cowell, 1993) because of the contrast she presented with the old male politicians. The benefit of the doubt that was granted to her even after her initial failures in the management of the economy, in her disappointing political leadership and the initial corruption rumours eroded in the face of constant political scandals. Her use of her gender, which helped her in the beginning of her career, was ultimately turned against her in a deeply patriarchal society when people started to associate her failures with her femininity and sexist critiques emerged such as the call to her to “go back to the kitchen” (Watson et al., 2005: 70).

Her unethical leadership especially her lack of integrity became the catalyst establishing her sameness with the previous leadership experiences of the Turkish political scene but also gave the people a sense of being cheated because it came from a woman. By demonstrating that women can be corrupt, self-interested, power-hungry, and unethical just like male politicians, Tansu Çiller discredited future women leaders’ claim to have the capacity for transformation of Turkish politics. She led, in fact, a transformation in the opposite direction (or rather confirmation of existing stereotypes about political leaders). It was not “a shift in the public’s conventional positive imagery about women in politics” (Cizre, 2002b: 207) since Turkey did not have an experience; hence, no positive imagery before Çiller but any potential for such imagery to develop was prevented by her presentation of a regular unethical political leadership style as feminine.

Eileen McDonagh argues that women political leaders’ maternal and democratic policies, in congruence with their gender roles, can potentially have two different effects on future prospects/electoral success for women political leaders. The first effect is an interpretive one changing people’s political attitudes by showing that women can be good political leaders. The second effect is a resource effect encouraging civic engagement (McDonagh, 2009: 98). The reverse logic tells us that the policy failures of women political leaders, especially if they are presenting themselves as “special” because of being women, can lead to the interpretive effect of making people think of women as unfit for leadership. Along with the “symbolic first” effect for those women who are the first women political leaders in their contexts, they may result in affecting prospects for women’s leadership in general negatively.

In the Turkish case, people, who have never had a woman leader before, stuck with Çiller because they hoped that she would answer their hopes for change, that she would be “conciliatory and selfless” due to her gender (Bennett, 2010: 136). The general belief (and Çiller’s own emphasis) that women are less corrupt and less power-hungry³ combined with the desperation of Turkish people leading them to hold on to any possibility of change provided a great political opportunity. Çiller played on these beliefs and hopes by emphasizing her femininity and introducing herself as the mother and sister of the nation. In the end, however, she turned out to be selfish, undemocratic, and corrupt (which, in fact, has nothing to do with her gender) stigmatizing women’s leadership. As a result, Çiller’s argument that “she is a better political and ethical leader because she is a woman” turned into “she is a worse political leader because she is a woman” in the eyes of the Turkish electorate obstructing the channels for any future woman political leader.

Today the political system is unable to produce an alternative leader to the increasingly authoritarian, corrupt, polarizing, hypermasculine, and power-hungry (“need for power” in Görener and Ucal’s scale (Görener and Ucal, 2011: 366)) leadership of the current president. Despite the polarization in the country and the dislike of half of the population toward the leadership style of the current president, which instigated protests and riots in 2013 (Turkey | Freedom in the World 2014, 2014) and a major electoral blow to his party in 2015 general elections (Arango and Yeginsu, 2015), there does not seem to be a space for the emergence of a new, perhaps a woman, leader. There is not even a search for such a leader among the people or the political elite within the opposition parties. Among other causes, one should recognize the effect of the Çiller experience on this trend, which will make us rethink the relationship between gender and leadership for the prospects of future women leaders.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Tuba Inal (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is an assistant professor of international Relations at Izmir University, Turkey. Her book, Looting and Rape in War: Law and Change in International Relations, came out of the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013. Her research and other publications focus on gender and politics, human rights, sexual violence, war, and international law. Her email is: tuba.inal@izmir.edu.tr

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