Manifesto? Gendered Patterns of Programmatic Issue Congruence in Western Europe

Research remains inconclusive on whether men's and women's political opinions are equally well represented in politics, and even less is known about how inequality in representation emerges and persists throughout different stages of the policymaking process. This paper examines representation at an early stage of that process: how men's and women's issue priorities are reflected in electoral programmes. Specifically, I ask whether political parties represent the issue priorities of men and women equally well, how parties differ in their programmatic congruence with the priorities of female and male voters, and how such variation relates to gender gaps in left-right ideology. To assess programmatic congruence, I compare the salience of issues in party manifestos with the issue priorities reported by men and women through 'most important issue' questions in Eurobarometer surveys. While manifesto pledges may not directly translate into policy outcomes, they reveal whose concerns are prioritized at the early stages of policymaking. If the set of promises already favors certain groups, inequality in representation emerges before policy implementation and is likely to persist throughout the process, ultimately producing bias in policy outcomes. Using computational text analysis within the framework of topic modelling, I code party manifestos according to the Eurobarometer issue categories and explore programmatic congruence between citizens and parties across 61 elections in 15 Western European countries between 2002 and 2019. I find that party programmes generally correspond equally well to the issue priorities of men and women. However, there are systematic partisan differences: left parties exhibit higher congruence with women's priorities, whereas right parties align more closely with men's. Finally, these gendered asymmetries in programmatic congruence correlate with, and may help explain, cross-national and temporal variation in the gender gap in ideological positioning.