A large body of literature has focused on potential causes and consequences of candidate nomination procedures. One of the received wisdoms in this literature is that loyalty to the party leadership in centralized systems and personal vote-earning attributes in decentralized systems rank in priority for representatives’ career prospects. However, the determinants of candidate nomination in countries with centralized nomination procedures have been significantly undertheorized, due in part to the implicit assumption that party loyalty outweighs any other factor in determining career decisions. We close this gap by analyzing nomination and promotion decisions in Turkey, a closed-list PR system with highly centralized nomination procedures. We argue that representatives’ parliamentary performance such as parliamentary activeness and issue concentration influence parties’ nomination and promotion decisions. Utilizing original data sets of biographies of 1100 MPs who served in parliament between 2002 and 2011, and over 18,000 parliamentary speeches and 1040 bill cosponsorships, we estimate empirical models that are explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model and find evidence that party leaderships favour incumbents who make more speeches and who display higher issue concentration, while penalizing electorally safe incumbents who seek legislative influence through private members’ bills (PMBs). Results offer important implications for the study of intraparty politics and parliamentary behaviour in general, and candidate nomination in particular.

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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