Spatial analysis of women deputies representation within the scope of gender and socioeconomic factors

The role of women in areas such as employment, education, social and politics is important in determining the socioeconomic development level of a country. It can be said that the effectiveness of women in these areas within the scope of gender in Turkey is not very high. Especially in the field of politics, the representation rate of women is quite low. Political participation of women mostly remains at the voting level. Women do not take many positions in high-level positions in political parties on the basis of political participation. For these reasons, the spatial dependence of the representation of women deputies in the study was investigated within the scope of socioeconomic factors. Spatial panel data analysis was used to test whether the representation of women deputies spreads among the border neighboring regions. According to the spatial regression models (Spatial Autoregressive Model, Spatial Error Model and Spatial Durbin Model), a suitable model for the study was searched with the likelihood ratio test. The Spatial Error Model was determined as the most appropriate model in terms of spatial coefficient, significance and sign of the independent variables. In addition, it is aimed to determine the socioeconomic factors affecting the representation of women deputies. In the analysis, the second level (26 subregions of Turkey) Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics (NUTS) data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) and the data of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) were used. While the the representation number of women deputies was used as the dependent variable in the analysis, gross domestic product per capita, crude fertility rate, woman employment rate, number of higher education graduates, number of divorced women and number of married women were used as independent variables. In the analysis, the fixed effects method was found to be valid in the Spatial Error Model according to the Hausman test. According to the Spatial Error Model results, there is a spatial dependence of the representation of women deputies between the border neighboring regions. In other words, it has a spreading effect among the border neighboring regions of women deputies. While the gross domestic product per capita, the number of higher education graduates and the number of marriages of women positively affect women deputies representation, woman employment rate, crude fertility rate and the number of divorces of women affect negatively. The study constitutes originality since there are no studies investigating the representation of women deputies with the spatial panel data analysis method.