National Projects and Feminism: The Construction of Welfare States through the Analysis of the 8M Manifestos of Progressive and Conservative Political Parties in Spain

Luis Navarro Ardoy,Alba Redondo Mesa

doi:10.3390/genealogy5030082

Abstract

This paper studies the national projects defended by Spanish political parties on the basis of the image they project in relation to women’s roles. To do so, we start with a critical review of nations and welfare states as masculinized projects, and from this we design a strategy based on the analysis of the manifestos issued by each political party in 2020 on International Women’s Day. The results obtained reflect the existence of three different ways of understanding the nation from a gender perspective: the first bloc, formed by the two conservative parties, PP and VOX, reproduces the nation by basing their discourse on gender inequalities, with a great weight of care for women; the second, formed by the most progressive parties (IU and Podemos), is situated in a clearly feminist perspective; the third, formed by the PSOE, shows a mixture of ideas that is reflected in considering both sexes as political subjects of feminism, and in presenting a discourse of the liberal and socialist current.

Highlights

This paper presents a novel approach to national projects and their construction based on the image projected by Spanish political parties in the manifestos issued in 2020 on the occasion of International Women’s Day (8M) in relation to women’s roles
This section presents the results obtained in two blocks. Those referring to the count of key terms related to womens roles, national projects and feminism in the five manifestos analyzed from the Spanish political parties on the occasion of 8M; secondly, those referring to the adaptation of the coding protocol developed by Humlebaek and Ruiz
We present a comparative analysis between the political parties and an individual analysis of each of them, highlighting the concepts with the greatest weight in the manifestos, those that refer to national projects and political ideology

Summary

Introduction

This paper presents a novel approach to national projects and their construction based on the image projected by Spanish political parties in the manifestos issued in 2020 on the occasion of International Women’s Day (8M) in relation to women’s roles. (PSOE), Unidas Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU)—and the conservative opposition, Partido Popular (PP) and VOX (see Supplementary Materials). The choice of this theme responds to three issues. Nationalism is mostly focused and dominated by a male and patriarchal perspective, which is reflected in the assimilation of different concepts to define the nation with those gender roles that are typically established

Objectives

Results

Conclusion