2025 Theses Doctoral

Essays on Gender and Loyalty Under Authoritarianism

Fan, Yujing

In regimes that demand loyalty, why do gendered differences in loyalty emerge? Loyalty is central to authoritarian survival, yet less understood is how gender shapes its expression and strategic value. Women navigate distinct barriers as political outsiders in conservative spaces that tend to resist their political participation. This dissertation examines how women employ gendered strategies of loyalty in authoritarian politics, revealing both pathways to women's political advancement and mechanisms of regime durability. Through three studies, I clarify why gendered differences in loyalty persist and the consequences for modern authoritarian resilience.

This first paper examines why gendered differences in party loyalty emerge in systems where party unity is tied to regime survival. Loyalty is vital in dominant-party regimes, yet difficult to credibly monitor. Women pose a distinct information problem as political outsiders to men's informal networks---where membership itself constitutes a signal of loyalty. I argue that this exclusion incentivizes dominant-party women to compensate through heightened public displays of loyalty. Analyzing original text data from over 800 members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2015-2023), I find that dominant-party women consistently outpace their men co-partisans in publicly declaring their loyalty. Contrary to prevailing theories, women are not generally more loyal than men---this gender gap reverses in opposition parties. These dynamics constrain women's advocacy, as dominant-party women limit their attention to less controversial women's interests to toe the party line. This research reveals how gendered constraints shape the expression of party loyalty, with consequences for women's representation under authoritarian rule.

The second paper evaluates how women and men express loyalty to contemporary autocrats. Standard theories contend that subordinates display excessive loyalty to substitute for limited skill. For women, however, a double-bind emerges: demonstrating competence is important for improving their political prospects, yet risks backlash for exhibiting gender-incongruent behavior in conservative contexts. I argue that loyalty legitimizes rather than compensates for women's political skill, offering a gendered pathway to power adhering to social expectations. I evaluate parliamentary speeches from the 26--27th Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Using machine learning, I find that gender shapes the frequency, form, and effectiveness of sycophancy. Women not only profess greater loyalty to the autocrat, but employ gender-congruent praise emphasizing the autocrat's compassion. These appeals yield material rewards, enhancing reelection prospects. This research complicates the conventional loyalty-competence tradeoff, revealing how gender influences strategies of political survival under authoritarianism.

The final paper reveals how autocrats leverage women's distinct voice in their broader communication toolkit, particularly when facing backlash over controversial gender reforms. Prevailing research contends that autocrats `genderwash' by claiming credit for gender reforms to boost their image. Positive messaging, however, loses credibility when regimes actively undermine women's rights. In these contexts, I argue that regimes pivot to negative genderwashing—rhetoric portraying the opposition as threats to women. Empirically, I draw on speeches from the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2015-2023) and use natural language processing to identify two central frames: threat magnification and hypocrisy claims. Results show that negative genderwashing intensifies following policy reversals affecting women, with clear gendered differences in how frames are deployed. Regime women leverage their distinct authority to highlight the opposition's hypocrisy, while men exploit masculine stereotypes to magnify their perceived danger to women. Findings clarify how autocrats weaponize gender discourse to reclaim narrative control when their credibility is compromised, revealing a valuable source of regime resilience.