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What women want: Mapping the issue concerns of women’s parties in Europe, 1990-2020.

Comparative Politics
Gender
Party Manifestos
Political Parties
Feminism
Mixed Methods
Political Ideology
Louise Luxton
University of Manchester
Louise Luxton
University of Manchester

Abstract

The body of literature concerning women’s parties, defined loosely as parties ‘of or for women’ whose aim is to increase women’s representation (Cowell-Meyers, 2016: 4), is largely comprised of case studies tracing the life span of singular parties in individual contexts. While recent studies have outlined the existence of a distinct women’s party family, comparative research has primarily focused on commonalities in the structural, socioeconomic, and cultural factors of party emergence and organisation (Cowell-Meyers, Evans and Shin, 2020; Ishiyama, 2003). As such, fairly little attention has been paid to shared ideology, one of the key defining characteristics of a party family (Mair and Mudde, 1998). The modest attention paid to ideology has resulted in a distinction between ideologically essentialist parties that advocate policies protecting the rights of women without challenging their societal status, and ideologically feminist parties that explicitly contest patriarchal narratives and structures (Cowell-Meyers, 2016; Shin, 2020). However, there is no existing empirical examination of this distinction, and we know little about the full range and scope of issues that form the shared ideology of the women’s party family. This paper aims to address this gap by linking feminist research on women’s parties to traditional party politics literature to a) identify the shared ideological foundations of the party family and b) map the diversity and scope of issue concerns of women’s parties across time and geography. As well as adding depth to our understanding of women’s parties, this research also contributes to broader discussions of issue ownership and strategic issue prioritisation in small party electoral strategy. To address these aims, this paper relies on original data, derived from mixed method textual analysis of European women’s parties’ election manifestos from 1999 to 2020. First, computational text analysis tools within the R quanteda package are employed to track issue mentions and issue diversity over time and geography. Second, interpretive methods including structural topic models and thematic analysis add nuance to the understanding of issue focus and allow for investigation of latent themes within manifestos that speak to the underlying ideology of the party family. The mixed method analysis finds that there is empirical support for the differentiation between essentialist and feminist women’s parties identified in earlier research. However, there are also shared issue focuses across the party family, primarily concerning traditional women’s issues such as social welfare and education. Interpretive analysis also identifies shared latent themes, particularly in the framing of policies around social justice and democratic legitimacy. Discussion of these findings evaluates women’s parties both as actors committed to feminist activism and as challenger parties with strategic electoral motivations.