Öz This study analyzes the effect of board member’s characteristics (political, national and gender) and board characteristics (board size, CEO-chairman duality) on bank performance, with the main attention being on the political board directors, in Turkey. By making use of a sample of 31 commercial banks in Turkey, during the period of 2002-2013, our empirical evidence shows that political board directors have a significantly negative impact on bank performance. We found new evidence that not only political board directors inhibit bank performance, but politically connected banks also have less accounting performance than their non-connected counterparts. Similarly, our results indicate that foreign board directors also affect negatively bank performance. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that gender diversity, board size and CEO-Chairman duality has no impact on bank performance. Our results are robust to the alternative time-period and estimation models.