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Government and Opposition (2025), 60, 989–1011doi:10.1017/gov.2025.12Government Opposition &ARTICLEGovernment and Opposition on the Road to EUAccession: Responsibility, Responsiveness andthe Salience of Gender EqualityKlaudia Koxha 1 , Zoe Lef k ofridi 2 and Nadine Zwiener-Collins 21 Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland and 2 Department of PoliticalScience, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, AustriaCorresponding author: Klaudia Koxha; Email: klaudia.koxha@unil.ch(Received 27 July 2024; revised 12 January 2025; accepted 21 February 2025; f i rst published online 5 August2025)AbstractWe theorize party attention to gender issues within the responsibility-versus-responsiveness framework, deriving and testing novel hypotheses in six WesternBalkan countries (2012–2021) that aspire to European Union (EU) membership. Weanalyse gender-related responsibility in European Commission (EC) recommendationsand examine party discourse to assess whether, how and to what extent parties and the ECalignunderconditionsofsupportive/opposingpublicopinion(responsiveness).Generally,attention to gender issues is low, especially on controversial topics like LGBTIQ+ rights(‘thick’ gender equality), compared to broadly accepted women’s rights (‘thin’ genderequality). Governing status inf l uences attention to ‘thin’ gender issues, while ‘thick’ issuesare highlighted mainly by green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) opposition parties. Ourstudy advances knowledge of how public opinion, governing/opposition status and partyideology shape party attention to gender issues in aspiring EU members.Keywords: GAL–TAN; gender equality+; government and opposition; responsiveness versusresponsibility; Western BalkansGender equality is a fundamental value of the European Union (EU); it is part of theacquis communautaire and has been integrated into all Community policies and activ-ities within the framework of ‘gender mainstreaming’ (Forest and Lombardo 2012;Spehar 2012). It is thus an important indicator for monitoring the progress of eachcandidate country for EU membership in integrating this acquis into national leg-islation. T h e European Commission (EC) guides and evaluates this process, issuingreportswithspecif i crecommendations.T h roughthesereports,theECdef i nes‘respon-sible government’ in candidate countries. To make their commitment to EU accession© T h e Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Ltd. T h is is anOpen Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article isproperly cited.https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2025.12Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 59.174.111.237, on 13 Sep 2026 at 03:11:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.