Party Nomination Strategies and Women’s Underrepresentation in Turkish Local Governments

Women remain significantly underrepresented in Turkish local government, despite an increasing trend in the recent elections. In this paper we examine the strategic nomination decisions of political parties using an original dataset of mayoral candidates for all 81 provinces in the 2024 local elections, covering all major parties. We examine two complementary mechanisms underlying women's underrepresentation. First, we ask whether parties are simply less likely to nominate women for provincial mayoral office controlling for their educational and occupational background and political career trajectory, and what party-level and province-level factors predict this nomination decision. Second, drawing on the glass cliff hypothesis, we ask whether parties that do nominate women are more likely to do so in electorally weak provinces, positioning them to contest races the party is unlikely to win. We test this by measuring each party’s prior electoral performance in each province as an indicator of expected competitiveness and assess whether women candidates are disproportionately concentrated in provinces where their party faces unfavorable odds. Finally, we examine whether observable candidate characteristics including education, occupation, and political experience differ systematically between women nominated in competitive versus uncompetitive provinces. This study offers a strategic, party-behavior-based account of women’s underrepresentation in local government and draws attention to the candidate selection practices that expose women disproportionately to electoral risk.