Party Competition and Party Agendas on Gender: Evidence from Spain

The emergence or growing electoral success of radical right parties in Europe has posed a strategic challenge for mainstream right parties. How should or do they compete with their more radical challengers? This paper examines party competition in Spain since the emergence of the radical right Vox in 2019, whose opposition to feminism is a core component of its political agenda. How has Spain’s Popular Party (PP) responded in terms of party agenda(s) on issues of gender? Leveraging multiple regional elections, at different points over a six-year period and differing patterns of party competition, the paper examines the patterns of party agendas in their regional manifestos and seeks to evaluate explanations of variation, including the electoral threat posed by Vox, governing alliance patterns and regional attributes. It seeks to contribute to the literature on competition between mainstream and radical right parties, generally, and to the consequences of the rise of the radical right in Spain, specifically.