How are Women MPs in Germany, Spain, and the UK Affected by Online Abuse?

Violence against women in politics has reached alarming levels. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU 2018), online violence is the most widespread form of violence that women MPs experience in Europe. The increase in populist and anti-establishment movements' popularity, especially online, suggests this trend will not diminish any time soon. Yet, no comparative research on this phenomenon exists, making it difficult to identify the institutional settings and political contexts that shape its prevalence, and types among women politicians. Similarly, social media's reach, availability and dynamism allow direct communication with political elites. While this facilitates political elites’ opportunities to share their ideas, it also exposes them, at the same time, to different types of abuse by citizens (often protected by the anonymity of social media). That is why this paper compares online abuse against women politicians in Germany, Spain, and the UK, three countries with different electoral systems and levels of digitalisation. Drawing on Krook’s (2020) broad definition, we define online violence against women as any abuse facilitated by digital technology, directed against politically active women, and motivated by the desire to exclude (or question) women as women from participating in politics. Accordingly, this paper will assess and compare the patterns of direct and indirect abuse women politicians in the three national parliaments encounter online (via Twitter/X) in a regular week of parliamentary work. Based on a dataset of 143,352 tweets, we combine linguistic and political approaches to develop a coding system, and to identify and analyse a) the level of uncivil tweets received, b) the types of abuse emerging from these uncivil tweets and c) the patterns emerging from the cross-country comparison.