This article examines the relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment through the Turkish case. The article first tests statistically the overall impact of urbanization on women's empowerment by tapping into educational, economic, and political indicators at the province level. The results yield a positive relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment. We argue that these empowerment indicators demonstrate the necessary conditions of women's empowerment, yet whether these are sufficient for women to feel empowered needs to be further tested. To do so, the article utilizes an extensive original survey of 334 well-educated urban women in 43 out of 81 provinces of Turkey to examine the extent to which the results found in the quantitative section are paralleled by the actual experiences of women. The survey analysis reveals prospects and obstacles that well-educated women face in old and new urban centers. This nonrandom, purposive sample of seemingly empowered urban women shows that the barriers faced by these women would easily multiply when lower strata of society are reached. The Turkish case demonstrates that societal transformations such as urbanization have an imprint on the fates of women, yet further women's empowerment needs collective action at the political, legal, and societal levels.

This article argues that patriarchal discourses can play a legitimizing role for the undemocratic elements of regimes. It focuses on neopatrimonial regimes in contemporary politics, which create impediments to democracy. Showing neopatrimonialism's link to patriarchal discourses, the study highlights the need to situate neopatrimonialism beyond its dominant contemporary usage as material exchange between the ruler and the ruled for political support. The Turkish case is analyzed to show how neopatrimonial acts of politicians are justified with a patriarchal discourse that is paternalistic and serves to reinforce personalistic rule, delegitimize opposition, and suppress pluralism.

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This article aims to understand the correlates of political trust by delving into the multiple interactive effects of education in democratic states throughout the world. It asks whether education raises political trust by increasing the stakes of the citizens in the system and whether education diminishes trust as a result of being abler to evaluate the existence of corruption in a given country. It also taps into how post-materialism as an individual-level factor affects this equation by activating critical judgments toward political institutions. The findings show that, indeed, the effect of education on political trust is very contextdependent. Political trust and education are positively correlated in more meritocratic countries and negatively correlated in the more corrupt ones. Post-material values, combined with educational attainment, tend to lower political trust to a certain extent yet this effect is surpassed by the presence or absence of meritocracy or political corruption. We also find that the effect of education on political trust becomes more pronounced as the level of education increases, with university graduates being the most susceptible to the effects of meritocracy and corruption on their trust levels.

This article provides an in-depth look at women’s empowerment through women’s cooperatives. Drawing on evidence from a diverse set of women’s cooperatives in Turkey, the article investigates the prospects and constraints of women’s empowerment in contexts lacking an enabling macro-institutional framework and societal structure. Listening to the real-life stories of women from different socioeconomic and political backgrounds, we explore how and to what extent members experience empowerment in their lives after joining the cooperatives. We find that, even under political and societal constraints, women experience economic, psychological, social, and organizational empowerment, though the extent of such empowerment varies across cases.