Voting behavior and attitudes of voters and candidates towards changing gender roles and family

Nowadays, the theories about gender and specifically about the development of gender identity have strongly concerned many theoreticians and researchers from various disciplines, taking into account the important role of the family, which constitutes a framework for gender development and perpetuation (Matlin, 2000). The issues of family and changing gender roles have also concerned the Greek society in recent years, observing the demographic data, a gradual deconstruction of the family and an increase of in the percentage of families that both parents work can be dis-covered, leaving aside the issue of having children (Maratou-Alipranti, 2019). The facts of the Greek reality are, therefore, the motivation for conducting a study of the behavior and the attitudes of Greek candidates and voters toward issues related to the gender roles and family using quantitative methods. The paper intends to systematically investigate political attitudes towards gender and family issues and their interaction with voting behavior in Greece. Moreover, relying on the data of 2022 International Social Survey (ISSP) on the Family and Changing Gender Roles and 2023 Hellenic Candidate Survey (ELCS2023) and the common items used in both questionnaires, such as attitudes towards raising children in different kinds of family, suitability of genders to serve in certain leadership and political positions and party choice, we aim to study and compare the attitudes of Greek voters and candidates on a number of issues related to changing gender roles and family. Greece has been used as a case study in this paper. In addition, data from social media, specifically from Twitter (X), will be used, trying to explore and develop some innovative methods for the collection, analysis and interpretation of this data related to candidates and voters and concerning their attitudes towards changing gender roles and family. In particular, the frequency of use of gender and family issues on the tweets of candidates and voters will be main points of this paper and also will allow us to study the congruence of voters and candidates at national lever and how these issues affect them. The collection and analysis of data from candidates’ and voters’ personal Twitter accounts and tweets have been carried out using tools, such as the R statistical program.