Populist Rhetoric and Women’s Political Representation

• In Event: Far-Right Political Parties

Abstract

With the rise of right-wing populist parties across the globe, public are increasingly exposed to rhetoric challenging gender equality and calling for safeguarding traditional gender roles often with strong references to religion. Political leaders from Hungary’s Fidesz, Spain’s Vox, Germany’s Alternative for Germany, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party often alarm the public about threats to traditional gender norms and family values, and emphasize the importance of women’s traditional roles (e.g., motherhood). In this paper, we examine how exposure to such patriarchal rhetoric in politics influence public support for women’s political representation. We argue that exposure to such rhetoric creates a backlash effect and mobilizes public to support gender-equality in political representation. However, this backlash effect is most likely to occur among a subset of the population; women who are not pious. Women, in general, are more likely than men to feel directly threatened by patriarchal rhetoric. Moreover, non-pious women are more likely than pious women to push back against such rhetoric because they are less likely to embrace religious values that patriarchal political messages often allude to. Accordingly, we argue that exposure to patriarchal rhetoric in politics will bolster non-pious women’s support and willingness to mobilize for gender-equality in political representation. Backlash effect of patriarchal rhetoric is less likely to occur among men and pious women. We show evidence supporting our argument with an experiment embedded into a nationally representative face-to face survey in Turkey, where public is regularly exposed to patriarchal rhetoric in politics in general and from the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) elite in particular.

Authors

• Deniz Aksoy, Washington University in St. Louis

• S. Erdem Aytaç, Koç University