How to measure party positions on gender issues?: new data for analysing political agendas

Abstract

This research note presents a new proposal to analyze gender issues in party competition. Despite the growing prominence of gender issues in public debate, there are hardly any indicators to measure gender salience and positions of political parties. Our proposal fills this gap based on quantitative content analysis of electoral programs and, specifically, on the extension of the classification scheme of the Regional Manifestos Project. We propose a new domain on gender to measure partisan strategies in four of the main areas identified by the literature: welfare and the labor market, gender violence, equal representation and values and identity. Using this domain, we have generated new data on the 2019 regional elections in Spain, which we make available to the research community. Here we present the first descriptive results.