Gender and Political Backlash

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Anti-feminist discourse plays an increasingly important role in radical right narratives, attitudes, and voting. However, the gender dimension of anti-liberal discourses potentially leading to democratic retrenchment is still poorly understood. This panel tackles several unresolved research questions in the broad field of gender and political backlash. First, while radical right voting is often explained as a counter-reaction to cultural changes like the rise of feminism, the specific reasons why feminism is perceived as a threat have seldom been measured and explained. Anduiza and Off’s paper offers a novel conceptualization, measurement, and range of explanations of threat perceptions. More specifically, they theorize threat perceptions as either ‘potential damage’ or as ‘vulnerability’, and measure them in relation to material as well as symbolic aspects, both for the individual and the broader collective. Their findings reveal when and why certain types of men and women feel threatened by feminism, and highlight the importance of focusing on the intersection between gender and other features like education, occupational background, ideology, and age. Second, while radical right narratives tend to benefit from gender-related and xenophobic discourses, we still do not understand how these two sets of attitudes relate and why they can reinforce each other. Two papers in this panel tackle this puzzle from the perspectives of elite communication and public opinion, respectively. The contribution by Fernandes, Meguid, and Weeks explores when and how political parties use gendered speech as a tactic to promote nativism and xenophobia. By looking at a wide range of legislative speeches of members of parliament in seven European parliaments over time, they unpack the patterns and the drivers of femonationalist appeals (i.e. rhetoric of gender equality to promote nativism) in political competition. Bjanesoy and Lawall’s paper sheds light on how this kind of elite communication strategy can influence public attitudes. More specifically, they explore the complexity of how certain gender-related frames induce tolerance for Islam-critical positions in public opinion. They test whether liberal frames of anti-Islam positions (i.e. defending women’s rights), as well as the gender and the party affiliation of the messenger, are effective at normalizing and increasing xenophobic and anti-Islam attitudes. Finally, while women and individuals with gender-egalitarian attitudes are known to vote for radical right parties less, the causal mechanisms behind this prominent relationship are still unclear. The Bolet et al. paper investigates a novel theoretical mechanism from a political economy perspective: the feminization of certain male-dominated occupations over time has led to an increase in anti-feminist and non-gender egalitarian attitudes. Two specific mechanisms are tested and compared: increasing shares of women can be associated with decreasing wages in a profession (due to discriminatory practices leading to gender wage gaps), and with a perceived status loss among men. Overall, this panel offers a comprehensive but well integrated approach shedding light on how gender has become a crucial issue in narratives that threaten some pillars of liberal democracy these days. The panel is composed of a group of scholars diverse in gender, seniority, and nationality. The different contributions rely on a wide range of sophisticated methodological approaches, including text analysis and topic modeling, survey experiments, measurement models like latent class analysis, and large-N cross-sectional and longitudinal panel data analyses.

Sub Unit

• Division 37: Public Opinion

Chair

• Sergi Pardos-Prado University of Glasgow

Discussants

• Sergi Pardos-Prado University of Glasgow

• Katharina Lawall Centre for the Politics of Feelings, University of London

Individual Presentations

• Feminism as a Threat - Eva Anduiza, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Gefjon Off, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

• When and How Do Politicians Use Gender to Promote Nativism? - Jorge Fernandes, Spanish National Research Council; Bonnie M. Meguid, University of Rochester; Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath

• Feminization of Work and Political Backlash - Diane Bolet, University of Zurich; Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Oxford; Sergi Pardos-Prado, University of Glasgow; Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University; Paula Rettl, Harvard Business School; Simone Cremaschi, Bocconi University

• Femonationalism and Citizens’ Preferences: A Multifactorial Survey Experiment - Sophie Mainz, Uppsala University