Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ELECTORAL STUDIES, cilt.99, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
How do parties update candidate lists after electoral setbacks, and what does this mean for women's repre sentation? We exploit Turkey's 2015 back-to-back parliamentary elections as quasi-experimental leverage and implement a difference-in-differences design that compares the governing Justice and Development Party (JDP) to the Republican People's Party (RPP), whose March 2015 primaries largely fixed the district-level gender com position of slates. Falling short of a single-party majority in June was followed by a roughly 40 % contraction in the JDP's women candidates and a disproportionate downgrading at electable ranks, interrupting a decade-long upward trend. The contraction is concentrated in conservative strongholds. A rank-weighted decomposition shows that net removals, rather than simple demotions, account for most of the decline; changes outside electable ranks are smaller and imprecisely estimated. Event-time estimates indicate the shock produced a one-off adjustment that reverted by 2018. Taken together, the evidence is most consistent with a mix of statistical discrimination where seats are at stake and attribution bias that overshoots, illustrating how elite responses under compressed timelines can quickly erode representational gains in closed-list systems.