How are Women MPs in Germany, Spain, and the UK Affected by Online Abuse?

Violence against women in politics has reached alarming levels. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU 2018), online violence is the most widespread form of violence that women MPs experience in Europe. Yet, no comparative research on this phenomenon exists, making it difficult to identify the institutional settings and political contexts that shape its prevalence and types among women politicians. Almost all research focuses on single-country case studies. There are only a few exceptions, which, however, either analyse single politicians from different countries (e.g. Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2019; Pérez-Tirado, Calvo Viota, Igarzábal Flasco 2024), which does not allow for any representative comparison, or they focus exclusively on English-speaking countries, like the US and Canada (Rheault et al 2019). Moreover, most of the previous research on online violence (against women) in politics has focused on Anglo-American countries (e.g., Dhrodia 2018; Rheault et al 2019; Gorrell et al 2020; Harmer and Southern 2021), disregarding European contexts other than the UK. That is why this paper compares online abuse against women politicians in Germany, Spain, and the UK, three countries with different electoral systems and levels of digitalisation. The paper assesses and compares the patterns of abuse 36 prominent women politicians in the three national parliaments encounter online (via Twitter/X) in a regular week of parliamentary work. Based on a final dataset of more than 10,000 Tweets, we combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify and analyse a) the level of abusive Tweets received, b) the types, forms and functions of abuse emerging from these Tweets and c) the patterns emerging from the cross-country comparison. Based on our analysis, we demonstrate the importance of analysing understudied cases like Germany and Spain, where we find higher levels of abuse than in the UK. We also find some interesting differences in forms and functions of abuse that we trace back to institutional differences between the three countries.