Party Nomination Strategies and Women’s Underrepresentation in Turkish Parliament

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the Turkish parliament despite using a closed-list proportional representation system, which is considered the most women-friendly electoral institution. While initial explanations focus on varying district magnitudes, a factor also highlighted by civil society reports pointing to districts historically electing only male representatives, this institutional variable alone fails to account for the variation across districts as many districts with similar magnitudes also elected women. Therefore, in this paper we shift our focus to the nomination strategies of political parties. We ask three questions: i) What are the conditions affecting the overall number of women nominated by political parties across different electoral districts? ii) What are factors affecting the number of women placed in viable list positions by parties across different electoral districts? iii) how do these affect the success of women candidates? We hypothesize that nomination in viable positions will be negatively related to the electoral competitiveness of the electoral district. We then examine how the strategic nomination of women affects their success in elections. To test these hypotheses, we construct an original party-district level dataset for the elections between 2002 and 2023 which also includes district level factors such as education, urbanization, religiosity and poverty. This paper offers a strategic mechanism to explain the underrepresentation of women in PR systems, demonstrating how seemingly favorable institutions can be undermined by strategic party behavior during candidate selection and nomination process.