Women's political parties' issue concerns and communication strategies

Abstract

Despite their consistent formation and participation in elections across various political contexts in the 20th and 21st centuries, women's parties have received scant comparative attention in party politics research. In particular, in recent years there has been a wave of feminist parties forming in European states, whose electoral behaviour and campaign strategies invite scholarly attention. These parties have the potential to operate as critical actors in increasing women’s descriptive and substantive representation by politicising gender-based issues. However, little is known about the specific issues that these parties mobilise or how they communicate them to the electorate and to other political parties. Therefore, this thesis endeavours to bridge a gap between gender politics and party politics research, through an investigation of the issue concerns and issue communication of European women’s parties – specifically feminist partiesin party manifestos, news media, and social media. I tackle this puzzle in three connected empirical Chapters. In the first, I present an in-depth comparative analysis of European women’s parties’ issue concerns, through inductive text analysis of an original dataset of election manifestos spanning a thirty-year period. In the second and third empirical Chapters, I use quantitative content analysis to investigate how the platforms of three feminist parties in Finland, Sweden and the UK are communicated via news media and social media across two second-order election campaigns. By situating women’s parties within the field of comparative party politics, this thesis conceptualises contemporary feminist parties as both doctrinal organisations that aim to substantively represent women’s interests and simultaneously as strategically motivated niche parties, pursuing office-seeking and policyseeking goals. Utilising a combination of mixed-method text analysis techniques applied to original data, I also offer innovative methods for measuring attention to gender-based issues in political texts such as manifestos, newspaper articles, and social media data.