Deliverable 4.2 of the UNTWIST project: Summary of findings WP4

This document consists in a report on the results of the coding procedure for party manifestos, the second main deliverable of Work Package 4 (WP4) of the UNTWIST project. WP4 is concerned with mapping feminist permeation in party manifestos, and estimating how parties in the six UNTWIST country-contexts - Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom - address gender-based needs (GBNs). Analysing whether gender-based needs are covered in party manifestos is a fundamental step for assessing areas of weak and strong, sufficient, or insufficient representation of GBNs by parties. The purpose of this document is to offer a quick summary of the background of this research endeavour, and the reasons justifying the development of an original coding procedure, the data collection, the development of the new coding procedure, their link with the Typology developed by WP1 (D1.1), and how these pave the way for developing machine-learning methods for the computational annotation of party manifestos (Section 2), as presented in our previous deliverable (D4.1). The document continues by providing a summary of the data basis and the methods for the following analyses (Section 3). Then, the results of the descriptive analysis concerning feminist permeation in party programmatic platforms are presented (Section 4). In this section, the salience of GBNs is analysed aggregating the data at the national-level, over time, party-types, and at the party-level (Section 4.1). Contextually, we consider the connotation – i.e., sentiment –1 of these topics, namely whether parties address these topics positively, negatively or neutrally. Next, we delve into which genderrelated topics tend to be discussed the most, again aggregating data in different ways (Section 4.2). Then we analyse one of the further analytical dimensions of our data, namely the ways in which parties frame gender-related topics, distinguishing between goals, issues, and policies. Furthermore, when mentioning policies to address these topics, we analyse the nature of the policy proposals (Section 4.3). Next, we consider the results of our expert survey gauging more general dimensions of our data, namely the gender ontology of a manifesto, the degree to which a manifesto entails a binary conception of sexes, the extent to which a manifesto promotes a patriarchal conception of the society, and how much a manifesto promotes heterosexuality as the only normal and socially acceptable sexual orientation of individuals (Section 4.4). Finally, the document ends with a discussion of the substantive results of the analysis of feminist permeation in the political supply of parties and the next steps of WP4 (Section 5).