Deliverable 2.3 of the UNTWIST project: Summary of findings
Creators: name: Ortiz Barquero, Pablo
name: Ruiz Jiménez, Antonia María
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Social sciences
subject: FOS: Social sciences
subject: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: Gender studies
subject: Women's studies
subject: Gender equality
subject: Gender inequality
subject: Social issues
subject: Human Rights
subject: Human rights violations
subject: Ideologies
subject: Elections
subject: Political sciences
subject: Public policies
subject: Civil society
subject: Democracy
subject: Public services

description: The Summary of findings is a deliverable that belongs to Work Package 2 of the UNTWIST project. This document summarises and describes the main findings from the 18 focus groups developed in the United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain. This report, therefore, builds on the previous deliverable 2.2 (Technical summaries of focus groups), which contains all the technical information relating to the design and implementation of the focus groups.

The overall aim is to measure and analyse right-wing populist parties (RWPP)’ voters’ subjective perception of their needs and demands, their horizon of expectations, and their level of ‘gender fatigue’. The coding and classification of those needs should help together with the data from WP1, WP3 and WP4 to test the hypothesis of UNTWIST for its first methodological phase, that is, if RWPP is acting as niche parties in the representation of certain gender aspects disregarded by RWPP. However, we also have device-specific hypotheses for the focus groups connected to our second methodological phase (testing if gender plays any role in voting for RWPP) with the purpose of start exploring this important expectation in ways that are also valuable in the design of our survey questionnaire. Those three hypotheses are based on the theoretical elaboration of the concept of “losers of feminism”, embodied in the theory of Gendered Positional Deprivation (http://hdl.handle.net/10433/16611).

 

As stated in deliverable 2.2, all the focus groups were conducted considering two main variables: gender (with a minimum of two same-sex groups per country, one with men and one with women) and voting behaviour (current voters of RWPP who have previously voted for mainstream parties or abstained or have doubts about RWPP and mainstream or abstain in case of voting for the first time). Moreover, other specific sociodemographic variables were considered for each national context (see Appendix A for detailed information).

 

This document is structured as follows. First, we present a qualitative examination of the focus groups, highlighting their global narrative and principal themes brought out by the participants. Second, the descriptive results of applying a coding protocol based on our UNTWIST typology (see Appendix B), and the main patterns of similarity and difference by country and gender are discussed. Based on these findings, sections 4 to 6 present the evaluation of the original hypotheses regarding ‘gender status loss’ and propose new theoretical expectations and future avenues of research. Finally, Appendix A contains the national reports for each analysed country, Appendix B includes the coding protocol, and Appendix C provides the moderation guidelines.