Mapping party competition on gender-related issues in Europe

Abstract

Gender-related issues have become increasingly contentious in European politics, but comparative research on how parties address them remains limited. Existing studies have generally focused on particular countries or issue areas, while systematic evidence on the attention parties devote to gender-related issues and the positions they express across countries and over time remains scarce. This article examines the prominence of and party stances on gender-related issues in European national election manifestos. We use manually annotated manifesto data from Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2021 to develop a fine-grained coding scheme and train computational models. We then combine supervised transformer-based topic classification with zero-shot stance classification to extend the analysis to 511 parties in 29 European countries between 1961 and 2025. The findings show that gender-related issues have become more prominent over time, although this development varies considerably across topics, party families, and periods. The increase is particularly pronounced for sexual and gender-based violence, LGBTQ+ issues, immigration and citizenship, and gender-related issues in the labour market. Care-related issues have remained consistently salient, whereas attention to gender equality in political and social representation has declined. Supportive statements are generally more prevalent than oppositional ones, although a substantial proportion of manifesto statements are neutral or descriptive. Despite fluctuations in temporal trends, positional differences between party families are consistently observed across topics. Left-wing, social democratic, green, and liberal parties generally express more supportive positions, whereas Christian democratic, conservative, and especially radical-right parties are frequently less supportive or more oppositional. However, the size and direction of these differences vary across specific gender-related topics. These findings illustrate the contextual and ideological multidimensionality of European party competition on gender-related issues and call for greater caution in treating such issues as a single political dimension.