Gender and populism have been extensively theorized separately, but there has not been sufficient study of the way that gender undergirds populism, strengthening its diverse manifestations. Focusing on the cases of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdoğan, we argue that their political performance allows them to project a right-wing populism that hides much of its political program in an ostentatious masculine posturing that has the virtue of being relatively malleable. This political masculinity allows them to position themselves at different points in time as outsiders yet insiders, bad boys yet good fathers. In their early years Putin and Erdogan established themselves as transgressive outsiders who developed a profile of power by building up their masculine, workingclass biographies. As their power became consolidated, they turned to a more paternal role, fostering a conservative gender order while attacking the masculinity of their opponents and casting them as outsiders. In this way over the years they have combined political performances that have both breached the conventional gender norms and also upheld and reinforced them. The result is a Janus-faced masculinity of outsiders-yetinsiders, bad-boys-yet-good-fathers, which establishes that the leader is both the same as other men and also different from them, standing above the citizenry, mediating and fostering a conservative political order. Understanding this gender performance also helps to explain the paradox of "electoral authoritarianism" (Levitsky and Way Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51-65, 2002; Schedler 2006), demonstrating how performed political masculinity can support and connect the cult of a popularly elected leader with conservative social and political gender norms.

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Policing is a gendered and gendering institution. However, the centrality of masculinities to the reproduction of public policing has received little scholarly attention. Drawing from fieldwork, including thirty-five in-depth interviews with police officials between 2013 and 2015, this study explores how public policing and police masculinities have shaped and influenced one another during Turkey’s move away from the established principles of electoral democracy as part of what I refer to as its “authoritarian relapse.” The study finds that macho and militarized masculinities constitute two distinctive modes of police masculinity against which the reformed masculinity of the “new police” stands in stark contrast. It contributes to debates on political masculinities by demonstrating the intertwining of state and masculine power. The analysis suggests that police masculinities and public policing take shape in line with the degree of commitment to democratization.

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