The gender gap in political knowledge is a classical problem of Western democracies. In the 21st century, political knowledge is still unequally distributed between men and women, as many cross-section studies have shown. This is an indicator of women’s disempowerment and the distance which remains to be covered to achieve an inclusive and sustainable society. Could public policies and gender equality laws change the situation? Using a longitudinal database in which 600,000 survey responses are analysed from 1996 to 2017, this case study of Spain aims to shed some light on this question. It combines sociological and political approaches in line with the development theory of the gender gap of Inglehart and Norris (2000, 2003), whose core argument is that modernization changes cultural attitudes toward gender equality. From this perspective, this paper proposes the following hypothesis: the modernization process of Spain (from a dictatorship to a democracy) has given rise to changes in traditional sex roles, driving women‘s access to political knowledge and diminishing the gender gap. This is a step towards achieving objective number 5 of the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development (gender equality and empowerment of women and girls), according to which gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world.

The COVID-19 crisis started with an increase in workloads for families due to the suspension of services and the fall of formal and informal care networks. Numerous studies have analyzed how home confinements have affected different gender gaps, including those related to work within the home. This research aims to contribute to the existing literature from the perspective of gender geography by introducing the variable municipality size in the analyses. Our research for the Spanish case appreciates a significant impact, uneven between genders, of the pandemic crisis. Women, and especially those living in small municipalities, saw the gap in care and domestic workload widen during confinement. The study of the distribution between genders of the most burdensome tasks even shows a more unbalanced scenario to the detriment of women. After confinement the situation improves. Although the imbalance against women remains, the gap with respect to the pre-pandemic situation is reduced.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gender dimension of its more visible socio-economic impacts has been the topic of study by several researchers. The current paper takes this further by focusing on the invisible chores done in the families at home. This paper studies how people’s behavior towards housework changed during and after the confinement period in Spain. We analyze whether people did more housework during the lockdown period than before it, the way this housework was distributed between women and men, and whether this has changed since the end of lockdown. The empirical analyses point to a new trend in the housework gender gap: differences between men and women have narrowed since the lockdown, although women continue to bear most of the responsibility.

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Coalition governments are common in the European political landscape in various tiers ofgovernment. However, such coalitions were an exception in the history of the Valencian Autonomy until 2015, which marked a new stage with the so-called El Botànic governments. Which factors explain this change in the Valencian political system? What are the features of such coalition governments? Can this model be applied to other political systems? This paper addresses these and other issues. First, it looks at what led to coalition governments in both 2015 and 2019. Second, it studies the model of coalition government. The hypothesis tested is this: El Botànic is a coalition government whose success in terms of stability and governmental action is framed within a specific Valencian political context.