Femonationalism and Citizens’ Preferences: A Multifactorial Survey Experiment

• In Event: Gender and Political Backlash

Abstract

Political leaders increasingly combine seemingly opposed political values in their communication, such as progressive gender views and conservative, nativist stances (‘femonationalism’ Farris 2017). The selective integration of liberal and conservative perspectives in, for example, femonationalist statements, is often understood as a strategic and instrumental political choice to attract new voters, mobilize against out-groups or promote specific agendas, sometimes radical in nature. While the supply side of this phenomenon has received increased scholarly attention over the past years, recent evidence suggests that selective liberal messages can increase the acceptance of anti-immigrant statements (Lawall, forthcoming), and raise support for LGBT+ policies among nativists (Turnbull-Dugarte & López Ortega, 2023). However, citizens’ reception is still not sufficiently understood. For one, it is unclear how different groups respond to the tension in values presented in such messages, especially with regards to relevant group identities such as partisanship and gender. Further, it is unclear whether citizens are willing to trade off certain (il)liberal values when confronted with their confliction, and the factors that determine such a response. Focusing on femonationalism as a prominent and contemporary instance of selective liberalism, the present paper seeks to contribute to these research gaps by answering two questions: to what extent are citizens willing to trade off their preferences on gender and immigration in response to femonationalist statements? What role do factors such as the source and content of the statement, but also partisanship and gender identity of the recipient play in influencing citizens’ preference trade-offs?

To answer these research questions, the present study conducts a multi-factorial survey experiment assessing the relationship between elite femonationalist statements and people’s policy preferences. More precisely, the experiment exposes participants in the treatment group to vignettes that represent typical femonationalist statements, portraying immigrants either as a threat to gender equality as a national value or as a threat to women’s security (message content). Two further attributes are varied within the vignettes, namely the partisanship of the message communicator (left-wing or right-wing), and the communicators’ gender (female or male). This results in a vignette universe of eight different statements. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of eight treatment groups, or to a control group. Thus, each participant is exposed to only one of the eight vignettes or none. This allows for a comparison between groups (between-subject design) to isolate the effect of the different treatment dimensions and between treatment and control. The outcomes include ranking items to assess value and preference trade-offs between the two issue domains gender and immigration. Further, absolute support for both gender and immigration policies is measured. This experiment design allows assessing whether the exposure to femonationalist statements as a form of selective liberalism impacts citizens' policy priorities and leads to trade-offs between conflicting preferences conditional on the message content, the gender and partisanship of the elite communicator and the receiving participant. Further, it is assessed whether the strength of partisanship and the matching of the participants’ and the communicators’ group membership (the communicator as an in/out-group member) play a role in this relationship.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it adds to the existing work on selective liberalism in that it assesses the dynamic behind preference and value trade-offs on behalf of citizens by assessing the causal link between femonationalism and concrete policy priorities and their relation. Second, the present study moves beyond existing work in that it introduces and tests a range of factors that can be assumed to play into this relationship, that have so far not been considered. On a broader level, the study contributes to the emerging scholarly field on conditional support of citizens and the resilience of liberal values in times where progressive ideas are instrumentalized to push and camouflage illiberal agendas.

Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press.

Lawall, K. (forthcoming). Gender-immigration messages: How women’s rights are used to normalize anti-immigration views. Under Review.

Turnbull-Dugarte, S. J., & López Ortega, A. (2023). Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism. American Political Science Review, 1–19.

Author

• Sophie Mainz, Uppsala University