Hi, everyone. Welcome. This is a joint session between the Women's Rights Research Seminar and the Middle East Politics Seminar, both hosted by the M.D. Centre and Oscar after school Global News Studies. My name is Mariam on Insider and an associate professor at OSCA and a fellow here at the Middle East Centre.
And it is my great pleasure to introduce Dr. to Bob was both our honourable guest tonight, and Dr. Bruce Kadar joined the European and International Studies Centre at my right at King's College as a lecturer in politics, and she specialises in political methodology. She holds a piece in political science from MIT. And before coming to Kings, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University. You might have heard the names of these places. I don't know.
She is also a faculty fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies alums, and her research focuses on political economy of development with a substantive focus on local governance, bureaucracy and state capacity. She also works on distributive politics, social welfare and migration, a an impressive array of topics.
And her work has been awarded, for instance, by the Mac or Olson best dissertation pricing political economy from the American Political Science Association, and she has received paper prizes from a comparative policy paper award from APS as well, and the APS Amino Politics section and the ABC's Religion and Politics section. Is it all for the same paper or several papers? All right. And the talk today is called Women and Intra Party Meritocracy in Closed List Systems.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Boskin. Hello, everyone. First of all, thanks for this kind introduction and I'm really happy to be here and I'm looking forward to your comments and questions about this research. Honestly, this is the first place we're presenting this project, and upon your feedback and comments, we may extend the papers so it would be really helpful for us.
Um, and in addition to that, I just want to add that today I received some bad news about my family, which may, you know, impact my performance here. So don't don't be offended if I look like, you know, a bit low energy and, you know, it's not about you, it's about me. Okay. So the title of our project is Woman, and in your part to Meritocracy in Clothes and the Systems. And this is a, quote, art project with a amazing student from Stanford University, Ravi Cooper, in this project.
I mean, the motivation of this project was essentially essentially originated the in the the the reason the origin of this project was essentially the bias towards gender candidates among voters.
But then we thought about other types of biases and how that gender bias actually doesn't really influence gender representation in the parliaments much in closeness PR systems, because parties, political parties have a much stronger control over politicians who will be selected rather than voters compared to like systems with a relative rule or compared to systems with open lists,
candidates lists. And therefore, we wanted to redirect the attention from voters biases towards party leaders biases, and see if politicians reward women politicians to the same degree as men politicians. Okay, so this was the motivation of this project. And so far, research in looking at the politicians behaviour, parliamentarians, behaviour and behaviour across different electoral systems.
Of course highlighted the gender differences in representation cycles as well as candidate selection criteria, and particularly in elections with a plurality rule or a claw clause in the system. Sorry, it should have said openness system. Voter biases and expectations also influence political parties nomination decisions.
In other words, political leaders, party leaders sometimes tend to think that because of existing voters biases against women candidates, they tend to, for example, nominate women candidates in less competitive districts and many candidates more competitive districts, which decreases the overall representation of female candidates in these electoral processes.
In addition to that, of course, in addition to voters own biases and expectations, there might be also a bias among party leaders towards women candidates, because that's actually the main decision making authority about candidacy processes.
And therefore, we wanted to shift the focus to this dimension how female politicians are being rewarded with in terms of like their promotion in candidates list placements and whether there is any difference in this in the effects of the in the effect of candidates performance on this placement position and whether women are basically held to higher standards compared to men based upon their performance in the place, basically in the party's candidate selection processes. Okay.
So all. As I said. So compared to like in contrast to open less systems or in contrast, you could relative rule systems in PR systems with closed list parties. Parties have a, you know, good control over which candidates are being elected because are you going to be elected because they can shape the lists, Right? They determine the candidates place and interest. And the candidates who are ranked first in that list are most likely to be elected.
Whereas in, you know, depending on your position, you may have like zero chance to be re-elected if you are at a lower ranking for political candidates in this placement lists and enclose lists PR systems. Of course, what matters in terms of re-election is just your position in the list. Okay, so this position is critical. This position is the only thing that determines your chance of being re-elected or not because there are no open lists.
So party will basically put the women candidates at the top if they want women to be elected, and they can even like preserve the gender balance across different electoral districts and, you know, have a gender balance, equal gender balance in terms of gender equality, representation of women in parts of lists, if they really want that. So they have they have a higher, stronger control over who will be re-elected. Thanks to the closed nature of the candidate lists in closed list systems.
On the other hand, there's a question with regards to whether parties actually care about politicians performance or politician's competence. We know that of course, in particular, actually the openness systems parties tend to nominate the most popular candidates to maximise the number of votes because of the relative rule.
But in closed systems, because the, you know, the re-election chances are going to be initially determined by the order in this list, the party has the actual control over whether this list is going to be balanced or not. And again, another characteristic of this clause, this system is that usually voters do not know the specific ranks of like specific politicians in a given electoral districts.
They just vote for the party and they leave the decision to choose the candidates to the party itself. Right? Oh, and a recent study Focus on the European Contexts finds that parties indeed tend to assign more competent candidate, competent candidates to higher ranks in candidates lists. And this is particularly strong.
This effect is particularly strong in electorally competitive districts, which make sense because they probably want to nominate the most competent, competent candidates in most competitive districts for them or in most important electoral districts for them.
On the other hand, while the current research looks at the effect of competence as measured by indicators like education, in this study, we wanted to focus on the actual performance of the coalition legislative performance, specifically during an election term and how that affects its position in candidacy placement in the in the list in the next election.
How basically does do politicians who show higher performance during an election term, do they are they being nominated from higher ranks in the next election? Do they get promoted by parts of the others?
If if we put it more intuitively, and because there is little evidence on the effect of parliamentary efforts and on like this re-election or on candidacy in the next election, we focus on this aspect of the candidates characteristics instead of like pre-existing competence, which so these usually measure by education level of politicians or other skills. Okay. So as I said, yes, I do think so. They focus on that. Are parties to more competent candidates for certain districts.
There are also findings that show that actually in more actually competitive districts are in more important electoral districts. There is a tendency to care more about competence for parties, so we know that they value the competence of candidates. And given that they actually nominate these more competent candidates in more competitive districts, means that politicians unaware of the advantage that competent candidates bring. Right.
So they assume like having more competent candidates in these lists, in part from this will increase their vote share in that electoral district. So that's the assumption they're making. And they're assigning the more competitive candidates to more important electoral districts.
They care about competence. However, given the opaque decision making processes within parties, which is we change a lot from context to context as well as from even like at the top national level, the procedures used to choose candidates may change. And therefore, this question has not received much attention so far.
In addition to that, we also want to redirect the attention to gender biased gender bias in candidate list placements and whether effort plays any role in candidate less mis placements in the next elections. So basically in this project we are going to look at whether the current time performance of a candidate increases its chance, increases the security of its position in the next elections list.
Okay. And with respect to the research question we are addressing here, there are two questions, but we will focus rather on the second. First, we look at how politicians efforts during the election term affects their placement in the following elections. So do we see any trend of part to meritocracy? And in addition to that, how does the affect of legislative effort on candidates placements vary between women and men?
And for example, if they reward certain groups for their effort but not others, that means that there are double standards with regards to decisions in candidate list placements. So our questions include questions such as Do party leaders apply a double standard for woman candidates just like voters do?
You know, as we know from existing literature, because voters actually have a mean woman, candidates have a disadvantage in terms of their competence because of the perception of voters about women candidates. Do we see the same double standard here as well in the party's own internal selection processes? And in addition, do they expect the higher performance from women candidates in order to promote them to a more secure in this position in the next election?
So these are the specific questions we are addressing in this research. And accordingly, we came up with three hypotheses, although I will focus on the second and third one today, because you will see that the steps are actually the, you know, the point that we are interested in. And in addition, of course, you will see that on average the we we found that on average the candidates, like the candidates effort, don't seem to have an effect on their positions in the next election.
But it has some effect among women. In other words, men are not judged based on their performance when the upcoming elections lists are determined, but women are based on their performance, are chosen. Selected based on their performance and ranked based on their performance. So basically, this meritocracy criteria only apply to women. And we think that probably other non meritocracy criteria apply to men like patronage network at the local level or party leaders.
Personal relationships with some of the candidates like loyalty. And therefore, we expect a gender difference. And we find that enable us to present our findings in the upcoming flights. And the second hypothesis. We will specifically test is whether female employees face higher benchmarks for legislative effort to achieve secure lift positions. In other words, do women need a show high effort in order to secure a good position in the next election?
And a second a third thing we are looking at is a vote for electoral competitiveness intensifies the meritocratic criteria for list placement positions. And of course, given that we don't find an effort effect for men politicians, we think that this will only be valid and applied to women politicians. Okay. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about the setting, which is Turkey, which is a multi-party system with a proportional representation rule.
And as you can see in general, the trend is a woman. Of course, the number of women candidates as well as employees is much lower compared to men, candidates and MPs. And there is a tendency to probably nominate women from lower ranking positions because when you look at the, you know, number of women candidates, the person described, it is higher than number of woman and piece. So it means that they were I mean, many women were actually put in like not electoral positions.
And therefore we are seeing this discrepancy between women in elected woman in placement less versus woman in actual who and woman that were actually that actually won the election and became an MP. And with regard to the percentages, like descriptive information on women politicians in the Parliament, we have a branch.
I mean, the party with the highest woman representation is Justice and Development Party headed by Erdogan and the main secular opposition party, CHP, and they have overall similar numbers of women representation. And this is the Kurdish party where we see a much higher woman representation, and that's also in their party program due to their like socialist agenda. Let's say it's a more socialist party propaganda that puts more emphasis on equality.
And this is a nationalist party, and it is not surprising that we have a lower percentage of women here. Okay. So this is the main four main parties in Turkey and the representation of woman in these parties.
In order to conduct the analysis, we will use a quantitative approach and we will specifically use panel data from multiple election terms to see whether a certain and given candidate's performance during an election term increases this position in the last election election in parties candidate lists. And for that, we collected data from basically the Parliament's main website. We collected parliamentary speech data.
In addition to that, we compiled the number of legislative proposals, verbal or written questions submitted by MPs, general debates, requests, parliamentary inquiry signatures, as well as a number of sessions. A certain a given MP spoke and the length of speech. These all come from the official website of the Turkish Parliament, was scraped from them, from these websites.
And in addition to that, we also used data on national election candidates and election results between June 2022 and 2018, using the electronic database of the High election Court. And finally, we also have some province level characteristics. Prices are like the electoral districts in Turkey. So in each province there are a like like, for example, in Istanbul, Iran's probably like 100 and police are elected just from Istanbul because of the population.
So in each multi-member district, we Turkey selects like a number of candidates. And in similar provinces, of course, the number of seats is much lower. Okay. So as I mentioned, the. Critical design draws on the panel design with two way fixed effects, which means we compiled this panel dataset where we have all the candidates in a certain election term. Of course, some of them drop out from the list if they are not nominated again.
So that's something we are still considering. And if you had suggestions about that, it would be very welcome. But in general, our approach is to just compile these multiple election trends and calculate the performance of each politician for each election term based on the number of legislative proposals or other activities they did in the Parliament.
And then we use that as an independent variable indicator to show politicians, in particular the MP performance legislative performance during the election term. And then the dependent variable is it is it is a it is an indicator called see security.
And specifically that shows based on the previous studies on the on similar topics like candidate list placements, we measure seats rank security by the number of seats the candidates party won in province in the prior election minus the candidates list rank in the current election. In other words, the higher the number is, the more likely the candidate is to be elected.
Because, for example, if there are 15 MP elected from Istanbul, from CHP, and if you are ranked one likes you, this value will be 14 and you are very likely to be elected. Okay. So with regard to some descriptive findings, uh, can I check the time? Like, you're like, 20 minutes. Okay. So with regard to the descriptive findings, as you can see, this is just descriptive. So it just shows the distribution.
The numbers of written questions generate the average numbers off like vision editing questions, general debate requests, legislative proposals, parliamentary inquiry session spoken and verbal questions across men and woman. And in general, the mean except maybe this one. The level of activity is very similar between women and men. Sorry, this is actually count. Okay, so this is counts. There was another graph I wanted to show you, but I wanted to show this one because it's very impressive.
Because despite the lower number of women, I mean, the number of activities they're doing is almost equal to men's activities. What time frame? This is from 2004 to 2018 to just the final. Yes. All yes, all pulled in the same data. Okay. So, I mean, with respect to me, there's scripted statistics. There is a clear, clearly impressive performance by employees who are women.
And when we look at like the descriptive statistics about the candidates and list orders, we are seeing that of course, here high ranking means a lower position. And one is the, you know, the most electable position. And here you are seeing that women on average have are lower ranked in candidates lists. And in the next election, we are seeing a similar trend, although it's not probably statistically significant lead different.
And finally, in terms of the see security in the next election, in other words, if we deduct the like the guaranteed number of seats from the rank of the candidate, then in that case, we are not seeing much difference between electability of women and man politicians. And this just shows the like pure survival rate in the next election, which means 22% of women politicians were re-elected, while in the case of man, it was much higher.
26 which means probably they were, uh, they were actually assigned to more secure positions. Probably. Okay, so I'm not going to show the overall results because it just masks the impact of performance that's caused by women. So basically, if you look at the pooled data and if you check if effort by legislative effort by parliamentary entry, wins have an effect on on their secure seat index in the next election, we do not see a strongly enough finding.
But then when we interact with that very which is like the, you know, the variable that shows the effort when we interact, that's variable with a gender, with a woman man indicator, then we find that actually parliamentary activities by women increase their positions. I mean the security of their positions in the next election. So meritocracy works for women candidates.
On the other hand, male politicians effort has like zero effect on their placement in the next election, and we are going to conduct additional allowances to analyse the mechanism through which men candidates are not judged by their performance. But we assume this is due to due to loyalty to like important parts of the users as well as, as well as their local patronage networks, which women many were.
I do not have. Okay. So if you look at the specific results, you will see that except for the case of except for the mean, we have different effort indicators here Sessions spoken, which shows the number of sessions in which are given quotations for written questions, which shows the number of written questions submitted today in Parliament. And there are also another indicator that just shows the questions that were asked verbally in the Parliament.
And then we have a number of legislative proposals. And finally we have to more indicate effort, indicators, general debate request and parliamentary inquiry, which is also something like like along with legislative proposals, it's also one of the most critical, most critical things that a politician can do in a parliament. So those two indicators may be, you know, maybe conducted by like more high level party positions rather than the newly elected, like recently elected politicians.
But still, I think they all show legislative effort in a accurate way, you know, in a huge way. And we are seeing that. I mean, the results are very strong, except for the case of general debates request and special spoken. So these like number of written questions or verbal questions or written legislative proposals or parliamentary inquiries, they have a strong effect in the candidate list placement of four woman candidates.
They have, as you can see. I mean, the numbers in the first six roles shows the impact for man. While these shows the effect for women, as you can see for men, this have almost like I mean, this doesn't have any significant effects of a significant effect. None of the parliamentary activities in form impact their electability and their position in the next elections list. But for women, their performance in the parliament is very important and increases their position in the next elections.
Candidate list. We also wanted to see. I will, of course, talk about what that means normatively in the conclusion part. But before getting into that, I also want to talk about the role of electoral competition. First, I think we are focusing on the size of provinces, for example, provinces like Istanbul or Ankara or Izmir. These are like big metropolitan cities and therefore there are so many politicians and they are also more competitive because all parties get votes from these provinces.
There is no let core districts in these provinces almost. And therefore, we are focusing on big provinces as an example, far more competitive and more demanded, of course, provinces because of course someone meet at Turkish MP will like will love to I guess prefer to be an MP of Istanbul rather than an MP of a smaller province. So it's also, of course it provides more access to resources if you are an MP of a big metropolitan city.
So in these big electoral districts which have very large populations, we are seeing that the gap between men and women, as you can see by the bar, is highlighted in pink. The pink bars are showing the ones the results for the big provinces, big and actual districts.
You are seeing that in general, the meritocracy, the importance of meritocracy criteria, the effect of candidates effort on its on her placement in the next election is much more important in these large scale provinces, electoral districts, which are also the most economically developed regions of the country. So basically, this gap between women and men, politicians and this reward gap is much more prevalent. And for the employees of the biggest provinces.
And in addition to that, we also check whether the important the impact of effort on women's position and the list changes depending by the level of electoral competition in the electoral district. And for that, we divide our sample into two, where the first category is the, you know, the ones with high competition as shown as paying here, and the ones with blue bar means shown in blue have lower competition.
And as you can see, except this puzzling case of legislative proposals in general, the efforts of women are and are actually affecting the their order in the candidate list, especially in most competitive districts. So that to me is that like that this translates to an implication which is that in most competitive districts, the decision about candidate placements are very different for women and men.
So for women, they look at their parliamentary effort and they really reward it when it's, you know, when when a woman politician shows a high parliamentary performance. But then in the case of women, there is no effect of parliamentary performance. And that's why the gap between women's and men's performance is even higher in these most electorally competitive districts.
Okay. So I think, you know, I will conclude with a discussion of the like main findings as well as the importance in terms of like the contribution to the literature. But also I will also talk about the next steps we are planning to conduct in order to learn more about why men or male politicians are not being promoted or maybe even like a mate. They can even lose their existing position based on their performance.
Their performance doesn't have an impact. And why is that the case? For that we are planning in the next that is a next step. We are planning to focus on the hometowns of politicians and whether for male politicians, their hometowns or networks. Play a bigger role compared to man because, you know, some employees are born there and live there, but some employees, especially the ones are in Istanbul.
Yeah, they are born like and in any like region of Turkey migrated to Istanbul so they don't have a local connection. But we are going to see if men are actually rewarded based on their local connections, based on their hometown status and the overlap between their hometown and the actual district they represent.
The second thing we want to look at is the history of a certain candidate within the party, because of course, some of the party members started working for this party at a very young age. So it might be the case that men and men actually started to work for the party at a young age and became basically the loyal supporters of the party leadership, which is why some of them might be promoted based on other criteria, such as loyalty rather than criteria such as performance.
So these are the next steps we are going to conduct. But of course, after day, after I comes to the findings, please let me know if you have additional suggestions regarding additional analysis. But in conclusion, we find that parliamentary after legislative effort on its own doesn't significantly influence and politicians prospects of obtaining coalitions likelihood of getting a higher ranked list position in the next election.
Okay. But when we look at the region between women and men, we find that women are subject to this, you know, high effort criteria, meritocratic criteria. Meritocracy works for women candidates, and they are held to these standards. However, in the case of male politicians, effort doesn't seem to have an effect, which means meritocratic criteria don't really play a role in the selection or in the promotion and within part promotion of male candidates.
And it's like a double edged sword because, I mean, you might think that it is a good thing that at least women are being promoted based on like meritocratic criteria. But on the other hand, that means that they are faced with a double standard. And in order to make the, like, party leadership happy, they have to show a much higher effort compared to their male counterparts.
And in addition to that, I mean, the other side of this double edged sword is that, of course, men, some meritocracy is better than no meritocracy. But that comes at the expense of gender inequality in representation and in promotion of politicians.
Okay. And, yes, as I reminder in part, in particularly electoral combat in districts which actually produced the upcoming leaders in the party, in most cases because MP serving for Istanbul or in Ankara always, you know, are more likely to become a prime minister one day compared to those employees in other places.
So in general, the fact that in more competitive and more important electoral districts, this gender disparity is even stronger shows us that the gender disparity might be even more substantial with regard to promotion criteria within the party in these critical electoral districts like Istanbul, which includes like 20% of Turkey's population.
Okay. With regard to theoretical contributions, this study showed the relationship between the legislative effort and political career prospects of employees in closely proportional representation systems. And instead of studies that focus on like pre-existing competence using indicators such as education, we focus on the effect of effort. So we don't instead of focusing on a stated concept of competence like education model, we are looking at the actual level of effort of candidates.
And the second, a contribution we believe is basically the, you know, the double standard thing that we talk about. A woman can be promoted to higher ranks in the lists only if they show high performance, whereas for men there is no such necessity and that is the, you know, the more like gender related implication of this study.
And in addition to that, of course there is a difference me, me thinking about the importance of large metropolitan areas, important districts like large districts, electoral districts with large populations in politics, for example, probably employees that represent London are maybe more likely to become a prime minister one day.
The fact that we have this disparity more pronounced in actually more important electoral districts may lead to faster gender disparities at higher levels of party positions, which we wanted to highlight. As I've said, this is my first presentation for this project, and it's a you know, it's a draft and we want to extend it in the coming weeks and we really will benefit from your comments or questions. Thanks a lot for listening and we'll look forward to your comments. Thank you so much.
Talk about this is a lot to think about and sort of yeah, think about like the surrounding and the context more so if I may kick off the questions, I was wondering if you can tell us about a more about the nature of the list that each party presents for each election. Are we talking about I assume that's not the case, but hypothetically, a fixed list with a certain number of individuals that only change, right?
Mm hmm. Or are we talking about like some being dropped out and some like added from like a larger pool of potential candidates? And also, is there agenda for out on the list that they have to meet or they want to meet informally? So because when you talk about how legislative performance affects or how basically legislative effort affects women's security more than that of men, I keep thinking about how how else can it be?
Is it the fact that there are fewer seats in general in that list dedicated to women to begin with so that there's a more competitive pool so that so that they so they can replace the few female candidates on the list more easily. The fact that the effect is heightened when we are in a competitive electoral district or when we are in like large cities, kind of like implies so so so I think it's very rewarding to know the nature of the list AS Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The list size I can answer immediately. Are you going to go? Okay, So yes, the lists are separate for each electoral district and of course it depends on the population because there is, there is a maximum number of one piece to be elected. So every party provides a list that includes the maximum number of employees to be elected, affirmed that district, you know, in case everyone wants for the same party.
And of course, the size of the list changes depending on the population of the electoral district. So, yeah, I mean, what you said is actually an important consideration because we may need to do additional checks to see whether what you know, the difference we find between more or bigger actual districts versus others. It might also result. Yeah, it might also result from this, you know, lower number of positions in smaller electoral districts, which is something good to think about.
And I'm a physician, but also so when we when you're talking like in the panel data. Yeah say is that more has that the maximum of 38. Yeah right and they're like I don't know ten women and 20 men are elected in 2004. Now we're looking at 2018. It's not the same list, only rank or change, right. It's a list. Of course, the list content change. Yes.
So sounds great. Yeah. And I'm asking whether there's a if there is a gender quota on the list and there is a A and no quota pool of applicants outside that can be selected and put on that list does that. It's like for instance. Yeah, it's like the labour market when there's like a high demand outside. Yeah, there's more competition to get in so the performance matters more. So if competition is higher amongst women themselves than amongst men.
Okay. Got it. Yeah. Yes. So you're saying okay, the pre-existing as the pool of aspirants may influence If they don't have a lot of women as parents, then they may have to. And if they had an idea of how many women we should ideally have on the list. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with regard to statistics, of course, I need to check the statistics more accurately to make sure that's not the case. But in general, actually, I know the number of candidates.
I mean, the likelihood to be in the list is higher for men because, I mean, women are still applying, but they're not usually elected for the list unless they're. Yeah, unless they have really like a high Valium valence level, like high competence level, for example, like currently we have may mean even some of there is going to be a mayor attended with a woman but who was also the head of like the you know engineering organisation in Turkey.
So there are of course them some competent women that are being nominated. But in addition to that, I think. In general, women are having a hard time to find a position for themselves in part in this, but I think it's worth to double check. Maybe we can find some data on like the number of nominations, like number of volunteers, like pirates. That will be very helpful. Thank you.