What does the 8th of March tell us about gender and political communication?

Thus, we engaged with a (quick and dirty) quantitative exploratory analysis of Twitter (then X) data that we collected for a previous project in which we addressed how politician’s engagement has changed during Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X. More specifically, we selected two random samples of tweets from German and Spanish politicians and parties’ accounts, between 2020 and June 2023. We then applied a large language model (LLM), fine-tuned on party manifestos from the UNTWIST project, to detect whether or not a tweet is gender-related or not. Finally, we estimated the percentage of tweets, in a given week, containing at least one sentence dedicated to gender-related topics, as predicted by our LLM. We use then this quantity as an indicator of political actors’ attention to issues related to gender equality, at least in their online political communication.

What we find is that, firstly, the average amount of attention given to gender issues during the week of 8 March is higher than the rest of the year. The purple dots in the figure above (Figure 1) indicate the proportion of tweets dedicated to gender-related topics in the weeks around 8 March, and they tend to be higher than the grey dots - which indicate attention to gender in the rest of the week. We can then see that attention to these topics is actually quite stable over time. Despite some fluctuations, the smoothed average, the blue lines in the graph, are fairly flat - with a slight increase in Spain. There are also clear differences in attention when comparing the German and Spanish contexts. In Spain, on average, more than 10% of the content of tweets is gender-related. In Germany, on the other hand, the average is around 7% of the content. Nevertheless, in the German case there isn't as much variation over time as in the Spanish case, suggesting that German political actors' attention to gender issues seems to be more consistent over time than in the Spanish case.

These findings are not particularly surprising. In part, they are similar to what we found when analysing party manifestos. There are obvious differences between countries, probably reflecting differences in political culture, institutions and, more generally, the historical trajectories that have shaped both. But parties do give different importance to different issues in different media. And what we see is that gender issues are indeed more prominent in online communication than in parties' manifestos.

Although our analyses produced interesting results, we were not entirely satisfied. Aggregate results, such as those presented above, may mask relevant patterns that might emerge when looking at more disaggregated data. So we decided to go one step further and look at how attention varies between parties or politicians.  This is because, in theory, attention should vary. Gender equality is an issue that, by definition, is linked to one of the most important and fundamental issues in democratic societies: equality. An issue that, in turn, is at the heart of a fundamental - if not the most fundamental - line of political conflict in Western liberal democracies: the left-right dimension.

We would therefore expect that parties that support equality on a range of socio-political issues - communist, post-communist, socialist, social-democratic, but also green, liberal, radical-liberal and liberal-democratic parties - would pay more attention to these issues than more conservative or traditionalist forces. We know that parties tend to emphasise issues that they 'own' for a variety of reasons, and we can safely assume that these parties 'own' equality issues because they're part of their core message. Nevertheless, we might also expect that parties that oppose equality on a range of issues might find themselves in a battle with more progressive forces. Radical right-wing populist actors have explicitly challenged gender equality on a number of issues in recent years as part of their campaign against what they define as 'woke culture'. We should therefore expect to see some attention to these issues from these forces.  And what our analyses show is that these expectations are at least partly correct.

In Germany, political actors tend to show rather similar levels of attention to gender issues. Politicians from the Greens and Die Linke are arguably those who pay more attention to the issue. But their attention is not far from that of members of the SPD and CDU/CSU or even the AfD. On the contrary, the party that seems to pay less attention to these issues is the FDP, the German liberals. It is also interesting to note that the Liberals and the AfD are the only two parties that tend not to pay more attention to these issues in the 8 March weeks.