  Stance detection (SD) concerns automatically determining the viewpoint (i.e.,
in favour of, against, or neutral) of a text's author towards a target. SD has
been applied to many research topics, among which the detection of stances
behind political tweets is an important one. In this paper, we apply SD to a
dataset of tweets from official party accounts in the Netherlands between 2017
and 2021, with a focus on stances towards traditional gender role division, a
dividing issue between (some) Dutch political parties. To implement and improve
SD of traditional gender role division, we propose to leverage an established
survey instrument from social sciences, which has been validated for the
purpose of measuring attitudes towards traditional gender role division. Based
on our experiments, we show that using such a validated survey instrument helps
to improve SD performance.
