How do parties update candidate lists after electoral setbacks, and what does this mean for women’s representation? 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 composition 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.
2025
Prolonged Guesthood: How Syrian Refugees Shaped Turkish Politics?
This study investigates the effects of Syrian refugee inflow on the voting behavior of natives in Turkey. We utilize administrative data at the provincial level, employ a difference-in-differences strategy for the identification and distance-based instrumental variable to account for the endogenous refugee settlement. We find a positive and significant effect of refugees on the right-wing nationalistic party’s (MHP) vote share, while there are no effects on the vote share of the incumbent party (AKP) and the main opposition party (CHP). Investigating the evolution of voting reaction after 2011 shows that AKP vote share first increased in 2015 then dropped in 2018 and 2023. When the heterogeneity of refugee hosting places is considered, CHP vote share increases in highly urban and lower population areas. Overall, our results indicate a considerable voting reaction from natives. We argue that perceived threats of natives based on their sociocultural positions and sociotropic voting behavior explain the natives’ reaction.
2024
Women Empowerment through Compulsory Schooling Reform: The Case of Türkiye
E.Kübra Usta, and Elif Erbay
Pursuing Sustainable Development Goals, IU Press, 2024
This study investigates the causal impacts of the 1997 compulsory schooling reform on women’s empowerment in Türkiye. The reform extended the compulsory education duration from 5 years to 8 years. The policy had an impact on individuals born in 1987 onwards, whereas those born in earlier years were unaffected. This allows us to employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and reveal the causal impact of the reform on women’s educational outcomes, their status in the family, and their perceptions and attitudes towards gender roles in relation to the Fifth Sustainable Development Goal. We examined the 2008, 2013, and 2018 waves of the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS), which is a nationally representative micro dataset. Results show that this large-scale reform has led to significant improvements in women’s educational outcomes. The policy has led to increases in the years of education, and completion of grade 8 and grade 11 for women, as well as a decrease in educational disparities between spouses. However, when we check other empowerment-related outcomes within the family, results show that the extent of empowerment is quite limited. Only one outcome in each set of variables (perception of gender roles, perception of physical violence, financial independence) shows empowerment. This suggests that higher educational attainment and improved educational status compared to the husband are not reflected in daily lives and the perceptions of women. All in all, stronger educational outcomes for women resulting from the policy have minor empowering effects.
2023
Syrian Refugees and Human Capital Accumulation of Working-age Native Children in Turkey
The arrival of Syrian refugees has significantly changed the labor-market conditions and the relative abundance of different skill groups in Turkey. We examine how the arrival of Syrian refugees affects school enrollment and employment of working-age native children using a difference-in-differences instrumental variable methodology. We find a significant drop in employment, largely due to children shifting from work-school balance to education only. School enrollment rises for boys, especially those with educated parents. However, the rate of girls not engaged in employment or education increases, particularly among those with less-educated parents, but decreases for boys with more-educated parents.
The Effect of Covid-19 on Primary School Enrollments: Evidence from Turkey
Elif Erbay
Post Covid Era: Future of Economies and World Order, IU Press, 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic caused considerable changes in every division in life, including online learning integrated into the formal education system. Since it had been a new experience for students and teachers, most parents had expressed their concerns over the effectiveness of the learning process. Hence, both the direct impacts of the pandemic and policies adopted in this period have substantially changed educational outcomes. This study empirically analyzes how Covid-19 affected primary school enrollments in Turkey using administrative data. Estimated findings show that primary school enrollments decreased by 1.8% in the 2020/2021 academic year. The primary source of this decline is that 5-year-old children who would have gone to public schools in the absence of the pandemic did not attend school during the pandemic.
This paper documents intergenerational educational mobility among women in Turkiye, using four waves of the Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys (2003–2018) and birth cohorts from 1955 to 1995. Combining absolute mobility measures – bottom persistence and bottom-up mobility – with relative mobility measures – intergenerational regression and correlation coefficients – the analysis tracks how the motherdaughter schooling association evolved across cohorts and regions, with the 1997 compulsory schooling reform serving as a key institutional reference point. Three main findings emerge. First, post-reform cohorts display a marked divergence: absolute mobility improves substantially, yet relative mobility remains persistently low, indicating that parental background continues to govern daughters’ relative position in the educational distribution. Second, bottom persistence does not converge to zero even among reform-exposed cohorts, indicating descriptive evidence of incomplete compliance and of constraints beyond the legal mandate. Third, regional maps show that gains were highly uneven, with weak upward mobility and persistent low attainment clustered in the east and southeast regions. Overall, educational expansion reduced extreme deprivation but did not equally weaken the role of family background in shaping women’s educational outcomes.
This paper investigates whether and to what extent local gender norms causally shape intergenerational educational mobility of women in Türkiye. I combine three waves of Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys (TDHS) between 2008-2018 with retrospective migration histories and construct a region x year indicator of gender norms for the period 1993-2018. The analysis focuses on daughters aged 21-49 whose mothers attained at most primary school and who migrated internally between ages 12-29. Intergenerational mobility is measured using mother-daughter educational attainment. The empirical strategy compares mobility outcomes of daughters who move across regions at different ages, and exploits variation in exposure to local gender norms generated by differences in age at move. The results show that moving to a more gender-egalitarian region at key schooling margins increases bottom-to-up mobility linearly in exposure time, whereas a placebo outcome - bottom persistence - exhibits no meaningful effect. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that these gains are driven by moves into more egalitarian destinations, while moves into more patriarchal regions do not generate symmetric losses, consistent with the idea that earlier exposure to egalitarian norms is difficult to undo. Additional evidence shows that daughters who move to destinations with smaller gender-norm gaps between origin and destination - i.e., lower cultural distance - experience larger increases in upward mobility, in line with an adaptation mechanism.
