In most states of the peninsula women’s formal
and informal political participation has increased
over the 1990s. Universal suffrage and the appoint-
ment of women to official positions have laid the
foundations for a revised perception of women’s
role in politics.
Bibliography
S. Joseph and S. Slyomovics (eds.), Women and power in
the Middle East, Philadelphia 2001.
U. Meinel, Zweifelhafte politische Reformen, in
Informationsprojekt Naher und Mittlerer Osten 31
(Autumn 2002), 36–8.
D. Nohlen, F. Grotz, and C. Hartmann (eds.), Elections in
Asia and the Pacific. A data handbook, i, Oxford 2001.
Iris GlosemeyerThe BalkansThe political participation of women is an im-
portant aspect of the democratization process.
However, in the Balkans there has been a sharp
drop in the level of the political representation of
women during the transition to democracy. Balkan
women have been deeply affected by the social,
economic, and political changes in the post-com-
munist era. The political underrepresentation of
women was accompanied by increasing unemploy-
ment among women and the rise of a neo-conser-
vatism stressing women’s maternal and domestic
roles (Bracewell 1996).
Although there were tremendous differences
among the Balkan countries prior to the establish-
ment of communist systems, in terms of economic
development, religion, political heritages, and pre-
vious traditions in regard to gender roles, the devel-
opment of women’s roles in communist Balkan
countries was similar. Education and employment
were the two areas that saw the greatest improve-
ment for women under communist rule. However,
this did not mean equality. Women’s wages contin-
ued to be lower than men’s and few women held
important decision-making roles in the economy.
Although women participated in symbolic political
activities such as voting and taking part in mass
demonstrations in numbers approximately equal to
men, they played a limited role in the exercise of
real political power within the Communist Party
(Wolchik 1998). Yugoslavia was the only country
in Eastern Europe that had a coherent feminist
movement (Ramet 1995).
There was a significant decline in the representa-
tion of women in political and administrative posi-
tions following the multi-party elections in the
early 1990s (there are no adequate data on women
the balkans 553from different religious groups). Under communist
rule, women formed between 20 and 35 percent of
the members in the national parliaments of the East
European countries. In the parliament of Slovenia,
economically the most advanced part of Yugosla-
via, women constituted 25 percent of the deputies.
However, in the post-communist Slovenian parlia-
ment this number fell to 10 percent, while in the
Bulgarian parliament it was as low as 3.5 percent.
In Albania, there were 73 women out of the 250
deputies in the last communist parliament while in
the first post-communist parliament the number of
women fell to 9 (Ramet 1995). Though there was
some progress in subsequent elections, women are
still underrepresented in the parliaments of the
Balkan countries (Slovenia 12.22 percent; Romania
bicameral 7.86 and 10.72 percent; Serbia and
Montenegro 7.94 percent; Croatia 20.53 percent;
Bulgaria 26.25 percent; Albania 5.71 percent;
Bosnia and Herzegovina bicameral 0.00 and 16.67
percent; Macedonia 18.33 percent). The situation
is no different in the Balkan countries with a non-
communist background. The percentage of women
in the Greek parliament is 8.67 percent while in the
Turkish parliament, in a country in which women
were granted voting rights as early as 1934, it is just
4.36 percent (Inter-Parliamentary Union).
Transitions to democracy were frequently com-
bined with a new electoral law. The Balkan countries
have introduced different variations of propor-
tional and combined electoral laws. Even though
there is strong evidence that proportional represen-
tation systems tend to benefit women candidates,
there is a trend toward the segregation of female
and male candidates on party lists (OSCE ODIHR
1998). The long-term effects of the regulations fav-
oring female candidates imposed by the interna-
tional community, such as the new electoral law in
Kosovo, which requires the political parties to
reserve a third of their candidate lists for women,
remain to be seen.
After the collapse of communism, many of the
multi-party elections in the Balkans were held under
extraordinary conditions. Particularly, the ethnic
tension in socialist Yugoslavia and the disintegra-
tion of the country shaped not only the political
behavior of men but also of the women living in it.
Since the early 1990s the political life of Bosnia-
Herzegovina has been to a large extent dominated
by nationalist parties formed on ethnic lines. In the
first multi-party elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina in
1990, the Muslim party, the Party for Democratic
Action (SDA), received an overwhelming majority
of the votes in the Bosnian Muslim community
(Babuna 1996). This party, which became a center