A successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder with limited list size for polar codes can not be analyzed as a successive cancellation (SC) decoder, nor as a maximum likelihood (ML) decoder, due to the complicated decoding errors caused by path elimination. To address this issue, an analytical tool, named as cluster pairwise error probability (CPEP), is proposed in this paper to measure the competitiveness of the correct path against the error paths in an SCL decoder. It is shown that the sum of CPEPs over error paths could be used as an indicator of the probability of correct path being eliminated from the decoder list. Then, we use CPEP to explain the error performance gain of parity-check-concatenated (PCC) polar code, and apply CPEP as the optimization criterion in the construction of PCC polar codes, aiming to reduce the elimination probability of the correct path in an SCL decoder with limited list size. Simulation results show that the constructed CRC-PCC polar codes outperform their counterparts of CRC-concatenated polar codes over various codeword lengths, code rates and puncturing patterns.