Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
SSRN Electronic Journal, sa. , ss.1-38, 2024 (Scopus)
How does political selection respond when the electoral stakes increase? Who gets to represent us? We study the effect that changes in the intensity of electoral competition has
on women’s political representation in Turkey. We leverage occurrence of two consecutive
legislative elections within few months as a natural experiment giving rise to a DiD strategy which allows us to identify JDP’s changes in its list composition and rank as a response
to heightened competition. We find that the latter led to a wholesale removal and demotion of women candidates from its lists, bucking the previous trend of increasing female
representation. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that most of the women candidates
were removed from electable seats and safe (conservative) districts. While this is consistent
with theories of statistical discrimination, the removal of women even from inconsequential
positions also reveals taste-based discrimination that has a compounding effect. A counterfactual exercise shows that had lists remained unchanged between the two elections, JDP’s
female representation in parliament would have been up by 50%, thus highlighting the role
that intra-party politics play in exacerbating gender-based discrimination (own-gender bias)
in political selection.