Gender issues and the structure of mass opinion
- Programa:
- Sesión 3, Sesión 3
Día: miércoles, 9 de septiembre de 2026
Hora: 16:00 a 17:45
Lugar: Sem. 2
Scholarship suggests that political conflict in Europe is largely structured by two main dimensions – economic and cultural. While this has been repeatedly confirmed at party level, the evidence concerning citizen-level dynamics is much more limited. We theorize that the structure of voters’ attitudinal orientations is more complex than previously assumed, but still meaningfully informed by social and political conflicts. In particular, we contend that the cultural dimension is a compound of very different issues that do not necessarily align together and that can differentiate voters on both sides of the ideological spectrum. To test these conjectures, we employ original survey data from Spain that includes fine-grained indicators on a large range of issues of various degrees of politicization, including both economic (redistribution, taxation) and moral-cultural issues (abortion, immigration, surrogacy, prostitution, gender self-determination), as well as issues at the intersection of the two (climate change) or tapping into nationalism and state decentralization. We use LPA to assess the complex configuration of this bundle of issues. We find that citizens’ attitudes map onto five distinct profiles. On the conservative side, we detect: a group of moderately conservatives distinguished by strong anti-abortion views, a second group of moderately conservatives for whom anti-immigration is a core issue and, finally, a group of moderately conservatives who are not clearly positioned on any issue. By contrast, on the progressive side, we detect two groups who are generally progressive on most issues but differ in their stances on prostitution and surrogacy (full libertarians versus qualified progressives), aligning with important debates currently ongoing within the left. Subsequently, we examine to what extent the five profiles map onto concrete socio-demographic groups, and how they relate to voting behaviour. Our results have important implications for understanding the structure of public opinion regarding cultural issues.
Palabras clave: gender, attitudes, dimensions of political conflict, issue politicization, latent profile analyses