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

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.

Keywords

• feminism
• welfare state
• national projects
• political parties
• gender roles