Do Party Lists Matter? Political Party Strategies in Legislative Candidate Nominations1

Ecevit, Yüksel Alper; Kocapınar, Gülnur

doi:10.1093/pa/gsx083

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The Turkish case provides two unique opportunities to test the backlash effect in legislatures. First, Turkey employs a closed-list proportional representation electoral system, where candidate nominations are determined exclusively by the party leadership (Yildirim 2018; Yildirim, Kocapınar, and Ecevit 2017; Ciftci and Yildirim 2017; Ecevit and Kocapınar 2018). Secondly, women have been historically underrepresented in the parliament and in the party leadership (Arat 1989), which in turn created an environment dominated by male MPs.…”

Section: Women and Politics In Turkeymentioning

confidence: 99%

Status Incongruity and Backlash against Female Legislators: How Legislative Speechmaking Benefits Men, but Harms Women

Yıldırım

Kocapınar

Ecevit

2019

Political Research Quarterly

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The literature on nomination procedures and intra-party politics shows that engagement in personalized parliamentary activities helps legislators get re-elected and promoted in the party list. However, as a considerable body of scholarly work suggests, women in leadership positions who are perceived to disconfirm the well-known gender stereotypes by being “too assertive” and “agentic” in the workplace may suffer from what social psychologists call the “backlash effect” (i.e., facing economic and social sanctions). Integrating insights from the literatures on perceptions of female leadership and intra-party politics, we reveal the differential effect of legislative speechmaking on the career prospects of male and female members of parliament (MPs). Specifically, using an original dataset of over thirty-five thousand parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 2,140 MPs who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 1995 and 2011, we show that the well-documented positive effect of engagement in parliamentary activities on career prospects holds for male MPs, but not for their female counterparts. In fact, we found that female MPs who were active on the legislative floor were significantly less likely to get renominated and promoted in the party rank. These results imply that the challenges facing women in leadership positions go beyond electoral competition.

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Section: Women and Politics In Turkeymentioning

confidence: 99%

Status Incongruity and Backlash against Female Legislators: How Legislative Speechmaking Benefits Men, but Harms Women

Yıldırım

Kocapınar

Ecevit

2019

Political Research Quarterly

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“…Considering the democratic relevance of the flexibility of candidate lists [i.e., parties' capacity to react to voters' changing preferences], it is surprising how little research has been undertaken into their intertemporal volatility. To our knowledge, the only longitudinal effort, which is limited to demand-side factors, is Ecevit and Kocapınar's (2018) recent study of Turkish parties, which suggests that even in party-driven closed-list systems, electoral defeats incentivize party leaders to seek strategic list changes. The few other recent, cross-sectional studies have also analyzed closed-list systems (Galasso and Nannicini, 2015;Rehmert, 2020) where candidates' personal reputations generally bear less weight (Carey and Shugart, 1995) than in preferential voting systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, as already mentioned, parties' strategic capacity can be hindered by various factors ranging from candidate supply to intra-organizational limitations, resources and skills. Therefore, besides demand [i.e., the question of 'what parties want', which Ecevit and Kocapınar (2018) exclusively focused on], it is important to take into account factors that might limit parties' capacity to operate according to the incentives that the party system bestows on them. By also accounting for these factorstheoretically, empirically and intertemporallywe aim to make a novel contribution to the emerging field of list volatility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What comes to the factors behind list volatility, is that parties win and lose in all democracies and, hence, one could assume that the effects of previous electoral success can be similar in other types of electoral systems as well (as also indicated by Ecevit and Kocapınar, 2018). Also, party membership decline is occurring in most Western democracies, but as the rate of decrease varies between countries and parties, more studies are needed to confirm the effect of this decline on candidate lists.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Revamping the menu – or just offering what’s in stock? Candidate list volatility in open-list PR systems. Evidence from Finland

Koskimaa

Mattila

Papageorgiou

et al. 2021

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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Why do parties change candidate lists between elections? Although candidate list volatility is an important indicator of the responsiveness of electoral representation, it has received little attention in research. We offer a critical case study of party list volatility in Finland, using a candidate-centred open-list proportional (PR) electoral system with ideal conditions for ‘ultra-strategic’ party behaviour. Our explorative two-stage research design begins with party elite interviews, to extract factors that can affect list volatility, which in the following step are tested in a regression analysis of 564 party lists in parliamentary elections 1983–2019. Our results show that list formation is a complex phenomenon, where demand and supply factors interact in a contingent fashion. Following trends of voter dealignment, personalization and ‘electoral-professionalization’ of parties, volatility has increased over time. Electoral defeats and declining party membership increase volatility, but a member-driven mass-party heritage that limits party elites’ strategic capacity has a stabilizing effect.

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“…A crucial example of party centralization can be seen in candidacy appointments through party headquarters instead of carrying out primary elections (see Ecevit & Kocapınar, 2018). Just as people started to believe that the governmental dominance of the AKP could not be challenged came the June 2015 election.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Party Positions and Electoral Dynamics in Turkey

Kumbaracibasi¹

2019

International Journal of Political Science and Urban Studies

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This article examines the June and November 2015 general elections in Turkey -the final elections before Turkey's transition into a presidential system -focusing on the political environment leading up to the elections, the coalition deals and potential coalition scenarios between the two elections and the aftermath of the November elections. The analysis is two-fold: first section looks into the background of electoral politics in Turkey and how policy dimensions of parties changed or stabilized over the years, covering the concepts of coalition potential, party adaptability and survival. The second section looks into electoral geography in Turkey, changes in voting patterns, strategic voting and the discrepancies in numbers in 2015.

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Do Party Lists Matter? Political Party Strategies in Legislative Candidate Nominations1

Cited by 11 publications

References 23 publications

Status Incongruity and Backlash against Female Legislators: How Legislative Speechmaking Benefits Men, but Harms Women

Status Incongruity and Backlash against Female Legislators: How Legislative Speechmaking Benefits Men, but Harms Women

Revamping the menu – or just offering what’s in stock? Candidate list volatility in open-list PR systems. Evidence from Finland

Analyzing Party Positions and Electoral Dynamics in Turkey

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