The salience of gender-related issues in European party manifestos

Gender equality is among one of the main purposes pursued by the European Union (EU). Nonetheless, a gender gap prevails in almost every domain of European politics. An important explanation for the persistence of such a gender gap is the traditional practices within political parties. It is uncontested that in European representative democracies, political parties are among the main actors with the power to hinder or promote gender-related issues. Therefore, we are interested in the way how political parties in Europe emphasize gender-related issues and the reasons thereof. In doing so, our paper seeks to map descriptively how much importance European political parties attach to gender-related issues. In addition to that, we investigate, under what conditions, i.e., when and why political parties put more or less emphasis on gender-related issues. Based on salience theory, we argue that parties decide strategically, whether they highlight gender-related issues or not. Beyond mere strategic considerations (related to the vote-, office- and policy-seeking nature of political parties), we assume that the context where parties compete in is an additional determinant. E.g., in countries with more gender equality (such as gender quota or higher female representation), parties are more likely to highlight gender-related issues. To study these and related research questions, we draw on two different data sources: On the one hand, we utilize data from the 2019 Euromanifesto project for all EU member states, which for the first time includes a broader set of gender-related coding categories. On the other hand, we exploit the data from the Horizon Europe funded UNTWIST project where we code party manifestos from six countries based on a gender-sensitive coding scheme. The paper adds to the growing research on gender and politics and its findings deepen our knowledge on party competition over gender-related issues.