UNTWIST briefing 04: Party Priorities And Positions On Gender-Related Issues

This document presents the fourth policy briefing of the UNTWIST project.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Scholars, pundits, and other commentators agree that gender issues have become a contentious topic in European politics, and that its polarisation has been mostly driven by right-wing populist parties (RWPPs). Systematic evidence about this phenomenon have been lacking, but this briefing partially fills this gap offering a first quantitative assessment of this phenomenon in the six European countries of the UNTWIST project, over two decades. What we find is that parties tend to attach relatively low emphasis to a range of gender-related topics, with important variations across the contexts analysed. During the last two decades, however, the salience of gender-related issues increased, in particular in the late 2010s and early 2020s. This does not seem related to RWPPs electoral growth. On the average, RWPPs do not tend to address more gender-related topics as compared to remaining parties. Yet they tend to focus on specific topics, and to address these issues more negatively. Moreover, we find that parties tend to address gender-related topics as general goals or issues to deal with rather than concrete solutions. We highlight the implications of these findings for policymakers.

Key findings:
● Overall, political parties, in their electoral manifestos, are not particularly concerned with gender needs;
● Nonetheless, important differences appear between countries and between manifestos for European and national elections;
● The salience of these topics has increased over time, in particular starting from the late 2010s, with important variations across countries;
● Over time, parties have decreased their attention to labour market or welfare-related topics;
● At the same time, parties increased their attention to reproductive rights, sexual and gender-based violence, or broader concepts such as patriarchy or heteronormativity;
● On the average, RWPPs do not emphasise gender-related issues more than other parties. Nonetheless, when they do it more negatively than mainstream actors;
● The increasing salience of topics such as gender rights, discrimination, and violence seem to be mostly related to RWPPs’ agendas;
● Parties tend to address these topics as general goals to achieve or issues to address, often without proposing concrete policies.