Dear faculty and students,
This Wednesday, December 7, Alper Ecevit (Bahçeşehir University) is coming to FASS to give a Brown Bag seminar. Dr. Ecevit is one of our MA-POLS alumni and he organizes the annual Empirical Studies in Political Analysis Workshop with Ali Çarkoğlu, which is gaining more prominence every year. In his talk Alper will outline his research agenda on how parties nominate candidates and present findings from two of his recent papers on this topic. One of these papers is attached to this email and you can find the abstract below.
Dr. Ecevit's talk will be in FASS 1080 and begin at 12:30. As usual, there will be snacks and cookies.
Hope to see you all there,
Kerim Can Kavakli
------------------------------
--------------------
Title: Political Parties and Candidates: A Research Agenda
Abstract: In this Brown Bag seminar, I will introduce a research agenda by covering two linked but separate papers that concentrate on the dynamics of the party politics over nominating candidates. In electoral studies, it is argued that profiles of the candidates are more relevant in districts with smaller magnitudes as candidates become more familiar among the constituency. On the other hand, PR systems are expected to diminish the importance of the candidates especially when closed-party lists are used. I found significant evidence in two different contexts where PR systems are used and candidates are used as strategic tools for party competition. In the first paper, I will be using Belgian local elections in 2006 as a case study to analyze how political parties integrate profile of candidates into their strategic calculations conditional on the social contexts and party ideologies. In the second paper, I will discuss our research project with Gülnur Kocapınar where we investigated the importance of party competition on nominating candidates at Turkey’s General Elections since 2002. The results reveal that candidates are important factors to consider for electoral competition despite institutional constraints.
