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Gendering the vote for populist radical-right partiesNiels Spierings & Andrej ZaslovePublished online: 15 Apr 2015.
To cite this article: Niels Spierings & Andrej Zaslove (2015) Gendering the vote for populist radical-right parties, Patterns of Prejudice, 49:1-2, 135-162, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2015.1024404
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Gendering the vote for populist radical-rightparties
NIELS SPIERINGS AND ANDREJ ZASLOVE
ABSTRACT Why do more men than women vote for populist radical-right (PRR)parties? And do more men than women still vote for the PRR? Can attitudesregarding gender and gender equality explain these differences (if they exist)? Theseare the questions that Spierings and Zaslove explore in this article. They begin with ananalysis of men’s and women’s voting patterns for PRR parties in seven countries,comparing these results with voting for mainstream (left-wing and right-wing)parties. They then examine the relationship between attitudes and votes for thepopulist radical right, focusing on economic redistribution, immigration, trust in theEuropean Union, law and order, environmental protection, personal freedom anddevelopment, support for gender equality, and homosexuality. They conclude thatmore men than women do indeed support PRR parties, as many studies havepreviously demonstrated. However, the difference is often overemphasized in theliterature, in part since it is examined in isolation and not compared with voting for(centre-right) mainstream parties. Moreover, the most important reasons that voterssupport PRR parties seem to be the same for men and for women; both vote for thepopulist radical right because of their opposition to immigration. In general, there areno consistent cross-country patterns regarding gender attitudes explaining differencesbetween men and women. There are some recurring country-specific findings though.Most notably: first, among women, economic positions seem to matter less; andeconomically more left-wing (and those with anti-immigrant attitudes) women alsovote for the PRR in Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland; and, second, thosewho hold authoritarian or nativist views in combination with a strong belief that gaysand lesbians should be able to ‘live their lives as they choose’ are disproportionatelymuch more likely to vote for PRR parties in Sweden and Norway. Despite thesefindings, Spierings and Zaslove argue that the so-called ‘gender gap’ is oftenoveremphasized. In other words, it appears that populist radical-right parties, withrespect to sex and gender, are in many ways simply a more radical version of centre-right parties.
KEYWORDS European Union, gender gap, populism, populist radical-right parties,voting behaviour
It remains unclear why more men than women vote for populist radical-right(PRR) parties. This finding has consistently been reconfirmed in the
Patterns of Prejudice, 2015Vol. 49, Nos. 1–2, 135–162, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2015.1024404
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literature on gender and the PRR,1 beginning with early research,2 andcontinuing in more recent studies.3 The discrepancy between how men andwomen vote for PRR parties is often referred to as the ‘gender gap’. Inaddition to this reported gap, it is not always clear why women who vote forthe PRR do so. Do they so vote for different reasons than men? Moreover, dotheir attitudes significantly differ from women who vote for centre-right orcentre-left parties?Two explanations are generally advanced to explain voting patterns
regarding women and PRR parties.4 First, researchers provide socio-economicexplanations,5 focusing on education, occupation and economic conditions(class). Second, they focus on men’s and women’s attitudes, particularly asthey relate to nativism and authoritarianism.6 Building on the literature thatidentifies nativism and authoritarianism as core ideological concerns of thePRR, research on gender and PRR voting links these concerns with oppositionto immigration and support for stricter law-and-order policies. The sugges-tion is that men are more nativist and authoritarian than women.7
The literature on the PRR (ideology and attitudes) often identifies a thirddimension, economic ideology and attitudes.8 There is, however, less agreementconcerning the role that the economy plays in explaining both ideology andsupport for the PRR. Scholars differ regarding the ideological positions ofPRR parties (are they welfare chauvinist or do they support neoliberalpolicies),9 and the extent to which economic attitudes are relevant in
1 Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress 2007), 111–12.
2 Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan 1994).
3 Pippa Norris, Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 2005).
4 On both, see Eelco Harteveld, Wouter van der Brug, Stefan Dahlberg and AndrejKokkonen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demandside in Western and Eastern Europe’, in these pages.
5 Ibid.6 Tim Immerzeel, Hilde Coffé and Tanja van der Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in
radical right voting: a cross-national investigation in 12 Western European countries’,Comparative European Politics, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, 263–86.
7 Ibid. However, as Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap inpopulist radical-right voting’ has shown, this assumption is not backed up by empiricalevidence.
8 Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe; Anton Derks, ‘Populism and theambivalence of egalitarianism: how do the underprivileged reconcile a right wing partypreference with their socio-economic attitudes?’,World Political Science Review, vol. 2, no. 3,2006, 175–200; Herbert Kitschelt with Anthony J. McGann, The Radical Right in WesternEurope: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995).
9 See Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe; Derks, ‘Populism and theambivalence of egalitarianism’; Kitschelt, The Radical Right inWestern Europe; and also SarahL. de Lange and Liza M. Mügge, ‘Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries:ideological variations across parties and time’, in these pages.
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explaining why voters support them.10 Despite this lack of consensus, thereare good reasons to assume that economic attitudes might explain whywomen support the PRR. For example, it is possible that women who areemployed in the public sector may be more supportive of the recent welfarechauvinist turn of PRR parties.
To summarize, research on gender and populism has focused on howbehaviour and attitudes differ between men and women. However, lessattention has been paid to the PRR vote and broader gender issues,11 such asthe traditional roles of women in terms of family and work, and homosexu-ality. In contrast to the other demand-side study in this special issue,12 thefocus here is on gender role attitudes. The question is: do supporters of thePRR (and women in particular) support traditional roles for women andoppose gay rights especially strongly? On the one hand, we might expect thisto be the case given the (historical) focus of the PRR on traditional values andmoral conservatism.13 However, on the other hand, we might expect theopposite given the PRR’s recent opposition to Islam, its emphasis on westernvalues, and its attempt to link Islam with the need to protect the rights ofwomen and other so-called minorities (such as gay and lesbian citizens).14
This study will therefore focus on the impact of voters’ attitudes on theiractual voting behaviour, and on how voters’attitudes relate to sex and gender.First, we outline our expectations and identify our variables as they relate tothe PRR vote and sex and gender. We then turn to the empirical section of thearticle. After discussing the data, the selection of countries and parties, and the
10 Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, ‘The vulnerable populist right parties: no economic realignmentfuelling their electoral success’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 44, no. 3, 2005,465–92; Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, ‘What unites right-wing populists in Western Europe?Re-examining grievance mobilization models in seven successful cases’, ComparativePolitical Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2008, 3–23.
11 Niels Spierings, Andrej Zaslove, Liza M. Mügge and Sarah L. de Lange, ‘Gender andpopulist radical-right politics: an introduction’, in these pages.
12 Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting’.
13 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe; see also de Lange and Mügge, ‘Genderand right-wing populism in the Low Countries’; Tjitske Akkerman, ‘Gender and theradical right in Western Europe: a comparative analysis of policy agendas’, in thesepages; Jens Rydgren, ‘Is extreme right‐wing populism contagious? Explaining theemergence of a new party family’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 44, no. 3,2005, 413–37.
14 Tjitske Akkerman and Anniken Hagelund, ‘“Women and children first!”Anti-immig-ration parties and gender in Norway and the Netherlands’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 41,no. 2, 2007, 197–214; Hans-Georg Betz and Susi Meret, ‘Revisiting Lepanto: the politicalmobilization against Islam in contemporary Western Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol.43, no. 3/4, 2009, 313–34; Willem De Koster, Peter Achterberg, Jeroen van der Waal,Samira van Bohemen and Roy Kemmers, ‘Progressiveness and the New Right: theelectoral relevance of culturally progressive values in the Netherlands’, West EuropeanPolitics, vol. 37, no. 3, 2014, 584–604; José Pedro Zúquete, ‘The European extreme-rightand Islam: new directions?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008, 321–44.
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operationalization of voting behaviour and attitudes, we turn to the results.The study begins with a descriptive section addressing the extent of the sexgap and whether this phenomenon distinguishes PRR parties from other (left-wing and centre-right) party families.15 This section will be followed by ageneral ideological-attitudinal model explaining why voters support theseparties across Europe. These attitudinal issues will also include support forgender equality (the first way in which we gender the analysis of PRRdemand). Subsequently, we explore whether the different attitudes havedifferent effects on men and women, and investigate whether the extent towhich voters support PRR parties depends on their attitudes regarding genderequality (the second way in which we gender the analysis of PRR demand).Our analysis (to the best of our knowledge) is one of the first to assess not
only sex differences in the demand for PRR parties, but also to explore thegendered element of this demand in terms of the political stances thatdistinguish PRR voters from other voters. As we conduct these analyses forseven countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Norway, the Netherlands,Sweden and Switzerland), both pooled and disaggregated, we are also ableto assess the extent to which gender is a defining characteristic of PRR partiesvis-à-vis other—left-wing and centre-right—parties and how the party familymight be divided along a gender axis; in other words, the extent to whichlocal context is important. Our general conclusion is that only a modest sexgap exists. Regarding the impact of women’s and men’s attitudes, we reporttentative results regarding gendered voting behaviour. The impact ofeconomic issues is gendered (in Belgium, France and Norway), and supportfor issues regarding gay voters or women is interrelated with authoritarian-ism or nativism in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. These results suggest thatPRR parties might attract women and gay voters—particularly men—with aneconomic left-wing or anti-Islamic ‘progressive’ platform. In some countries,it is possible that gender issues may become salient in the future. However, atpresent, we conclude that the maleness or masculinity of the PRR seems tohave been overstated in the voting literature. For both women and men, theiropposition to immigration is the key reason why they typically vote for thePRR; it is what sets PRR parties apart from other parties.We thus conclude, paraphrasing Cas Mudde,16 that the search for a sex gap
may be linked to an underlying assumption guiding research on the PRR,namely, the notion that radical-right parties are a pathological response tosocio-economic and political transformations and, as such, are scrutinizeddifferently than mainstream political parties. In contrast, we conclude thatvoting for PRR parties is a more radicalized version of voting for centre-right
15 We prefer the term ‘sex gap’ rather than ‘gender gap’ despite the fact that the latter ismore commonly used in the literature. The main reason is that an analysis based ondistinguishing between women and men is not one analysis of gender patterns but ofdifferences in the averages of each sex.
16 Cas Mudde, ‘The populist radical right: a pathological normalcy’, West EuropeanPolitics, vol. 33, no. 6, 2010, 1167–86.
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parties (what Mudde terms ‘pathological normalcy’) and should be scruti-nized accordingly.
Theory: sex, gender and support for the populist radical right
The PRR is widely accepted as constituting a party family.17 The ideologicalprofile of the party family consists of nativism and authoritarianism.18 Inaddition, the literature has identified a seemingly clear profile of PRR voters.Supporters tend to come from the working and lower-middle classes, beeither very young or older, have strong anti-immigrant attitudes, lower levelsof trust and, perhaps most importantly for this article, they tend to besupported more by men than by women.19
The extant literature on the sex gap has obtained clear results. Three keystudies marking the evolution of PRR parties all note that more men thanwomen support the PRR. In 1994 Hans-Georg Betz stated: ‘As if followingsome unwritten law, radical right-wing populist parties have consistentlyattracted a considerably higher number of male than female voters.’20 In 1995Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann noted: ‘in all countries men areoverrepresented in the rightist electorate with a 60–40 to 70–30 margin.’21
More recently, Pippa Norris highlighted the over-representation of men withregard to support for the radical right in 12 of the 16 countries she studied.22
It is less clear, however, whether PRR parties should be regarded as men’sparties (Männerparteien). First, male over-representation is often claimedwithout comparing it to broader patterns of how women vote. To paraphraseCas Mudde, even if it is true that more men than women vote for the PRR, thedifferences in support (but also in leadership and the sex composition ofmembers of parliament) are less convincing once compared with mainstreamparties.23 In other words, insufficient emphasis is placed on how (poorly)mainstream parties perform with respect to women and political representa-tion.24 Second, it appears that, as the PRR has become entrenched in existing
17 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe; Rydgren, ‘Is extreme right-wingpopulism contagious?’.
18 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.19 For a good overview, see Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. See also Betz,
Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe; and Kitschelt, The Radical Right inWestern Europe; Norris, Radical Right.
20 Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe, 142.21 Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe, 76.22 Norris, Radical Right, 144–5.23 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.24 Sarah Childs and Joni Lovenduski, ‘Political representation’, in Georgina Waylen,
Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola and S. Laurel Weldon (eds), The Oxford Handbook ofGender and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), ch. 19; Lena Wängnerud,‘Women in parliaments: descriptive and substantive representation’, Annual Review ofPolitical Science, 12, 2009, 51–69.
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party systems—signified by continuous support from voters and participationin government—more women vote for the parties in question. There isevidence that the sex gap is context-dependent and that it may be disappearingin some countries.25
Why men and women vote for PRR parties
Our first task in this article, therefore, is to assess the degree to which men aremore likely than women to vote for PRR parties. The next step is to explorewhy women vote for the PRR and whether the reasons they do so might differfrom those of men. Here, we will briefly discuss the most importantattitudinal clusters that the voting behaviour literature associates with votingfor PRR parties (nativism, authoritarianism). We also include a EuropeanUnion (EU) variable, due to the growing importance of EU integration to thePRR agenda. In addition, we include variables concerning voting behaviourin general (socio-economic issues, environmentalism). The question is theextent to which we can expect these attitudes to explain different levels ofsupport for the PRR among men and women, and whether they might have adifferent impact on PRR voting among men and women. Following thisdiscussion, we will shift our attention to attitudes on gender equality.The literature on populist parties (both from a demand and a supply
perspective) notes the importance of nativism and opposition to immigra-tion.26 As Tim Immerzeel, Hilde Coffé and Tanja van der Lippe note,27 theassumption is that, because more working-class men vote for the PRR andmen are more likely to experience direct competition from immigrants forjobs, men will be more anti-immigrant than women. In addition, women aremore likely to be employed in the public sector and/or are more likely toremain at home, and are therefore also less likely to fear competition frommigrants.28
Another implicit assumption is that men have more authoritarian attitudesthan women. As Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe also note, this assumption isbased both on research on the PRR and on the socio-psychologicalliterature.29 On the one hand, it is possible that men feel threatened by theirloss of status (that is, from the postmaterial values revolution), and, as aresult, are more affected by authoritarian values. On the other hand, there is
25 Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting’; NonnaMayer, ‘From Jean-Marie to Marine Le Pen: electoral change on the far right’,Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 66, no. 1, 2013, 160–78.
26 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.27 Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting’.28 Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting’;
Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting’.
29 Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting’.
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also evidence that men prefer to resolve moral issues through tougher lawand order policies, while women prefer a more ‘collective’ and ‘care’-orientedapproach.30
While studies on the PRR agree that the parties in question are nativist andauthoritarian, there is more controversy regarding their economic policies.This controversy can be explained as follows: first, there is no clear consensuson the role that economic issues play in the platforms of the parties or in voterattitudes. Most extant studies note that supporters are much more likely tovote for the PRR because of their opposition to immigration than because oftheir economic attitudes.31 As nativism plays such an important and decisiverole in explaining why voters support the PRR, there has been less research onthe economic platforms and ideology of the PRR. Moreover, second, there islittle agreement on the ideology of the PRR regarding the framing ofeconomic issues.32 While in the early 1990s, researchers noted that the‘winning formula’ for PRR was neoliberalism (combined with opposition toimmigration),33 more recent studies argue that the more general trendtowards welfare chauvinism is particularly strong among PRR parties withanti-EU immigrants positions, which has resulted in an economic movetowards the political centre.34
In addition, studies on women and voting note that women have becomeless tied to conservative parties (that is, than previously assumed). Althoughwomen’s voting patterns are diverse, there is ample reason to believe thatthey may be increasingly attracted to left-wing parties.35 For example, there isevidence that women will be less supportive of spending cuts due to theirgreater reliance on social spending and because they are often employed inthe public sector.36 We might, therefore, expect women who vote for the PRRto demonstrate more left-wing economic attitudes.
30 Ibid.31 Ivarsflaten, ‘The vulnerable populist right parties’; Ivarsflaten, ‘What unites right-wing
populists in Western Europe?’.32 Betz, Radical Right Wing Populism in Western Europe; Derks, ‘Populism and the
ambivalence of egalitarianism’; Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe; LaurenzEnnser, ‘The homogeneity of West European party families: the radical right incomparative perspective’, Party Politics, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, 151–71; Jan Rovny, ‘Wheredo radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition’,European Political Science Review, vol. 5, no. 1, 2013, 1–26.
33 Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe.34 Derks, ‘Populism and the ambivalence of egalitarianism’; Anthony J. McGann, and
Herbert Kitschelt, ‘The radical right in the Alps: evolution of support for the Swiss SVPand Austrian FPÖ’, Party Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, 2005, 147–71.
35 Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, ‘The developmental theory of the gender gap:women’s and men’s voting behavior in global perspective’, International Political ScienceReview, vol. 21, no. 4, 2000, 441–63; Miki Caul Kittilson, ‘Party politics’, in Waylen,Celis, Kantola and Weldon (eds), The Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics, 536–53.
36 Kittilson, ‘Party politics’.
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As well as the abovementioned attitudes, we also include two others: thoseregarding EU integration and the environment. Some authors note theEurosceptical nature of the PRR.37 Previous research on gender and EUintegration has demonstrated that a small gender gap exists, with women beingless in favour of EU integration.38 Given PRR parties’ increasing emphasis onthis issue, it is possible that opposition to EU integration contributes to womenvoting for the parties in question. Environmental issues are important, as theyare considered to be a component of the new survival v. well-being axis and, assuch, are related to other postmaterial attitudes, including cosmopolitanismand multiculturalism, which are positioned at the opposite end of theirrespective policy spectrums from authoritarianism and nativism.39 In addition,green parties tend to be considered more feminine and draw relatively moresupport from women (see also Figure 2 below); and PRR parties areoccasionally the most vocal opponents of green (left-libertarian) parties.40
In sum, each of these attitudes may partly explain a gap between men andwomen’s support for PRR parties or why voting behaviour differs betweenmen and women. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a focused empiricalassessment of the gendered element of how people’s attitudes shape theirchoice to vote PRR.
Gender equality issues
Thus far, we have focused on why men and women vote for the PRR. Thereis, however, good reason to believe that gender equality issues—in thebroader definition41—may play a significant role in the PRR vote in twodifferent ways as well. First, PRR parties have been associated withtraditional positions on family values and family life (that is, due toauthoritarianism).42 By glorifying the traditional life of the common man,
37 Sofia Vasilopoulou, ‘European integration and the radical right: three patterns ofopposition’, Government and Opposition, vol. 46, no. 2, 2011, 223–44; Margarita Gómez-Reino and Iván Llamazares, ‘The populist radical right and European integration: acomparative analysis of party-voter links’, West European Politics, vol. 36, no. 4, 2013,789–816.
38 Brent F. Nelsen and James L. Guth. ‘Exploring the gender gap: women, men and publicattitudes toward European integration’, European Union Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000,267–91.
39 Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and PoliticalChange in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997).
40 Piero Ignazi, ‘The silent counter-revolution: hypotheses on the emergence of extremeright-wing parties in Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 1992,3–34.
41 See Spierings, Zaslove, Mügge and de Lange, ‘Gender and populist radical-rightpolitics: an introduction’, in these pages.
42 Akkerman, ‘Gender issues and the radical right in Western Europe’; De Lange andMügge, ‘Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries’.
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PRR parties have also actively advocated traditional gender roles andgendered divisions of household labour. Moreover, nationalist agendas tendto emphasize nation-building and reproduction as a means of strengthening acountry, and are at odds with postmaterial values that might threaten theconcept of the traditional family and reproduction, such as support forabortion and same-sex marriage. As such, it might be expected that voterswho are strong supporters of gender equality do not vote PRR or that PRRparties attract those who strongly oppose gender equality.
Second, a seemingly contradictory trend is observed in certain instances inwhich the nativist agenda is linked to the PRR’s growing opposition toIslam.43 In recent years, especially since 9/11, such vocal opposition has beenexpressed by increasing numbers of PRR parties. The overarching argumentis that Islam threatens western values (defined as Christian values).44 In linewith this argument, the PRR also contends that western traditions andcivilization ensure equality between the sexes and protect gays and lesbians.Thus, gender and LGBT equality become instruments of anti-Islam rhetoric.Islam is presented as a threat to freedom and equality with respect to theposition of women and homosexuals. There is, therefore, good reason tobelieve that attitudes regarding gender equality and lesbian and gayemancipation may play an increasingly important role in explaining whypeople vote for the PRR, and they might be associated with the nativist, anti-immigration, anti-Islam agenda in a mutually reinforcing manner.
Methodology
Data
We use data from Round 5 (2010) of the European Social Survey (ESS).45 Of allavailable cross-country data sets, this is the main source that includesinformation on voting behaviour and indicators for all of the attitudes andfactors discussed above. There are two distinct advantages of using Round 5:first, we can present a relatively recent depiction of the role that gender plays;and, second, for seven countries, the number of respondents reporting havingvoted for PRR parties allows us to conduct statistical analyses. Therefore, wecan compare the results across established democracies in Europe, and assessthe extent to which the results are specific to the local context.
43 De Lange and Mügge, ‘Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries’.44 Akkerman and Hagelund, ‘“Women and children first!”’; Zúquete, ‘The European
extreme-right and Islam’.45 ESS Round 5: European Social Survey Round 5 Data (2010). Data file edition 3.2.
Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway, Data Archive and distributor of ESSdata. For online data, see the European Social Survey website at www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/download.html?r=5 (viewed 12 February 2015).
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Dependent variable
The dependent variable was measured dichotomously, whether or not arespondent voted for a PRR party in the surveyed election. In line with theclassification discussed in the introduction to this special issue, the PRRparties analysed here are the Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) inBelgium, the Dansk Folkeparti (DF, Danish People’s Party), the Front national(FN, National Front) in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party forFreedom) in the Netherlands, the Fremskrittpartiet (FrP, Progress Party) inNorway, the Sverigedemokraterna (SD, Swedish Democrats) and the Schwei-zerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party). All parties included receivedat least a 4 per cent vote share or 40 votes in the survey. In three cases, therewas more than one PRR party present in the data. As the maximum numberof respondents that reported voting for those parties was 5, they wereexcluded from the analyses.46 Respondents whose answers were ‘invalid’,‘blank’, ‘not voted’ and ‘mixed’ (Switzerland) are not included. Given thebinary nature of the PRR vote variable, we estimate logistic regressionmodels.47
In line with most of the literature on popular support for the PRR and thegender gap in particular,48 we have chosen to focus on actual votingbehaviour. It should be noted though that voting behaviour is an either-orchoice in each of these countries. Even those that did not vote for the PRRmight have been inclined to do so. However, they did not and, in terms of theimpact PRR parties might have in parliament, this is crucial. At the same time,
46 Including these voters does not lead to substantially different results.47 We do not focus on socio-economic differences or other material explanations for
voting behaviour. The exclusion of these factors from our discussion and analysis doesnot imply that we consider them unimportant. Evidently, demographic and socio-economic characteristics differ by sex, and they are important explanatory factors ofattitudes. Causally they are prior to the attitudes we use as explanations. Therefore,excluding these factors should not bias our models. To test this, we have rerun thepooled full interaction model (Table 1, Model 3) with three core control variables: age(in years), education (in years of full-time education completed), and religiosity (0=‘Notat all religious’ to 10=‘Very religious’). The results are very similar: all the samecoefficients and interaction terms are statistically significant and the coefficients showthe same directs and size. In other words, not including these factors has not biased ourresults. In themselves, particularly having a higher education and being older, theyappear to have a negative impact on the probability of voting PRR (p<0.001). For amore detailed analysis of the impact of socio-economic factors on the demand side ofPRR politics, see Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap inpopulist radical-right voting’.
48 Terri E. Givens, ‘The radical right gender gap’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 37, no.1, 2004, 30–54; Marcel Lubbers, Mérove Gijsberts and Peer Scheepers, ‘Extreme right‐wing voting in Western Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 41, no. 3,2002, 345–78; McGann and Kitschelt, ‘The radical right in the Alps’; Norris, RadicalRight.
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it is important to assess the potential electorate of PRR parties, as can be doneby studying the propensity to vote PRR.49
In the country disaggregated analyses, the groups of PRR voters arerelatively small, and this has been taken into account in the interpretation ofthe results. We do not only focus on the statistical significance, but also look atthe substantive size of the coefficients and interaction terms.50 In addition, inthe tables, we also report the relationships that are statistically significant atthe 10 per cent level (p<0.10) so as to provide full information. But we relymostly on the relationships that are statistically significant, using the stricterand more common criterion p<0.05.
To provide a more detailed view of how PRR voters differ from othervoters, we also distinguish between voters for centre-right and centre-leftparties. We re-estimate our models using multinomial logistic regressionanalysis. The results of these analyses will be mentioned in the text whererelevant. In many instances, the additional models are not mentioned. Inthose cases, the typical left-wing and centre-right voters are more alike, withPRR voters standing apart, so that the logistic results suffice. If we do mentionthe difference, the distance between PRR voters and centre-right voters ismuch smaller than that between the left-wing and centre-right voters. Theclassification of each country’s parties can be found in the Appendix.
Explanatory attitudes
In the analyses, we are primarily interested in the ideological positions thatdistinguish PRR parties from other party families and how this relates to sexand gender. Consequently, we include a dummy variable for sex (1=woman,0=man). In line with the theoretical discussion, we include variables relating tonativism and authoritarianism, economic left-right differences, attitudes to theEU, and environmentalism, as well as various indictors for gender equalityattitudes. For several of the attitude variables, we performed exploratoryfactor analyses to assess which items best measure the underlying concept.51
All variables are recoded on scales from 0 to 1 to facilitate comparisons.Respondents’ nativist attitudes were captured by focusing on indicators of
views on immigrants. The data include six items that all load on the samefactor:52 how many immigrants of another race/ethnicity in relation to the
49 Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting’.
50 See Donald N. McCloskey, ‘The rhetoric of economics’, Journal of Economic Literature,vol. 21, no. 2, 1983, 481–517; Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Cult ofStatistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press 2008).
51 Principal axis factoring, with oblique rotation.52 KMO 0.851; Bartlett’s Test significant (p<0.001); Eigen value 3.888; all factor
loadings >0.650.
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majority of the country’s population should be allowed in the country, andtwo similar items for immigrants with the same race/ethnicity or from poorcountries; whether immigration is bad or good for the country’s economy;whether immigrants undermine or enrich the country’s cultural life; andwhether immigrants make the country a worse or better place to live. Afterrecoding them all on scales running from 0 to 1, we calculated the average.On the final index, a higher score indicates a stronger anti-immigrant stance.Authoritarianism was measured using three Likert items: ‘People who breakthe law should receive much harsher sentences’; ‘All laws should be strictlyobeyed’; and ‘Doing the right thing sometimes means breaking the law’.A higher score indicates that the respondent believes in stricter law-and-ordermeasures.To measure respondents’ views on economic redistribution, we combined
Likert items on whether the ‘Government should reduce differences in incomelevels’ and the ‘Government [should] do more to prevent people falling intopoverty’.53 A higher score indicates less support for redistribution, namely, amore right-wing ideology. Regarding attitudes towards the EU, few variableswere available in the ESS data. Given this constraint, we decided to use thetrust-related questions that were available. The ESS provides information ontrust in the European Parliament (EP) (0–10), as well as trust in other nationalinstitutions. We calculated the average trust in the country’s parliament, legalsystem and police as a general trust-in-government indicator and comparedthat to trust in the EP to represent the EU. The general way in which PRRparties discuss the EU partly legitimizes this choice: voters that dislike the EUwill most likely not distinguish between the commission, council, parliamentand EU as a whole. The general trust score was deducted from the EP trustscore to correct for the fact that those who score high on EU trust have morefaith in politics generally (and we were interested in the EU, not generalpolitical trust). The attitudes of the respondents towards the environment wasmeasured using a six-point scale on whether they think that ‘care for natureand environment’ is important. A higher score indicates a more ecologicalstance and taps a broader cluster of postmaterial values.The last three indexes all relate to freedoms and emancipation and are
derived from an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on 9 items. The resultsindicate that six items represent three different factors that were theoreticallyrelevant.54 The first measures support for personal freedom and development:
53 Both items load well above 0.4 on the same factor. The Eigen value is 1.414; KMO 0.500and Bartlett’s Test is significant (p<0.001). In an EFA including two other items, the twoitems used load together on one factor, the only factor with an Eigen value >1. The itemsthat do not measure are whether it is ‘important to help people and care for others’wellbeing’ and whether it is ‘important to be rich, have money and expensive things’.
54 The three items not included in the three indexes used in this study were: does therespondent find it important in choosing a job whether it allows one to combine familyand work; does the respondent feel that his/her gender group is discriminated against;and does the respondent feel that his/her sexuality group is discriminated against.
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whether it is important ‘to make one’s own decisions and be free’; whether itis important ‘that people are treated equally and have equal opportunities’;and whether it is ‘important to understand different people’ (all six-pointitems). A higher score on the averaged index indicates that a respondentvalues individual freedom and development, which might capture broadergender expression issues than the questions focusing on economic equality.The second focuses on economic gender equality, with two items: ‘Womenshould be prepared to cut down on paid work for the sake of family’ and‘Men should have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce’. Weconstructed an index based on these five-point scales, where a higher scoreindicated greater support for equality. Third, attitudes towards homosexualitywere measured by the (five-point) item as to whether ‘Gays and lesbiansshould be free to live life as they wish’. A higher score indicated greatersupport for the proposition.
To assess whether the impact of the attitudes were gendered, we includedinteraction terms between each of them and the sex dummy variable as wellas the gender equality variable and the respondent’s attitude towardshomosexuals in the country-specific models.
Results
Descriptive analysis: Männerparteien?
Are PRR parties primarily supported by men? For the seven countries as awhole, 9.9 per cent of respondents claimed to have voted for the PRR. Amongmen, the share was 11.6 per cent and among women 8.2 per cent, a differenceof 3.4 percentage points or 29 per cent (p<0.001). It seems that women supportPRR parties to a lesser extent. However, does this make PRR parties men’sparties? To address this question, we compare sex divisions amongsupporters of PRR parties with those among supporters of mainstreamparties (see Figure 1). While on average, non-PRR parties receive approxi-mately as many votes from men as they do from women, PRR parties clearlyreceive more votes from men. It is important to note here that still more than40 per cent of votes for the PRR come from women. In debates over, forinstance, women’s representation in parliament, this number is regularlyconsidered to be gender equal or balanced.55 The label Männerparteien seemswarranted but suggests a stronger domination by men than is actuallyobserved.
These conclusions hold if we disaggregate the data by country. Figure 2depicts the percentage of votes that parties in each country received fromwomen and men. In each of the seven countries, the PRR parties are ‘on thescale’: they are not outliers, but in the company of other (major) parties.
55 Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar (eds), Breaking Male Dominance in OldDemocracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013).
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Moreover, the PRR parties consistently place first or second in terms of beingprimarily supported by men. The other parties that complete the top two varysomewhat regarding ideology or party family. In the four most northerncountries (Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden), second place istaken by the Conservatives and Conservative Liberals; in Belgium, theFlemish Socialists come second, while in France, the centrist Union pour laDémocratie Française (UDF, Union for French Democracy) and, in Switzer-land, the Freisinnig-Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party)‘compete’ with the PRR. Nonetheless, Figure 2 shows that overall the sexbalance among voters for PRR parties is much more like that of conservative,conservative-liberal and liberal-democratic parties than that of socialist, socialdemocratic and green parties. This pattern fits the more general pattern thatwomen tend to have more left-wing attitudes and vote for more left-wingparties since the ‘gender realignment’ of the 1990s.56
Explanatory analysis
In the analyses explaining why women vote for the PRR (more than men), wefirst examine the seven countries in aggregate: which attitudes (includingthose concerning gender equality) explain the PRR vote, and does thisdistinguish PRR parties from other parties (Table 1, Model 2). This analysiswill also indicate whether these attitudes explain the existence of the sex gap
0%
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PRR Other par�es
Women Men
Figure 1 Support by gender
56 Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Changearound the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 81–5.
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(Table 1, Models 1 and 2). The next step will be to determine whether theimpact of these attitudes differs between men and women (Table 1, Model 3).Subsequently, we will disaggregate the results by country (Table 2) andexplore whether the impact of certain attitudes depends on the positions ofsupporters with regard to gender equality and homosexuality (Table 3). In themodels that include interaction terms, only the interaction terms that were
Belgium
0%
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.AN-VA
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OpenVLD PSCD&V
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DF KFP RV DLP SD SFP Other
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FN UDF PS UMP Les VertsOther
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Switzerland
0%
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FDP SVP CVP SP GLP GPS Other
MenWomen
Figure 2 Support by gender by country57
57 For full names of parties and their left-right characterization, see Appendix.
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statistically significant at least at the 10 per cent level were retained, forreasons of space and the ease of the reader.
Pooled analyses
Nativist, anti-immigrant attitudes are the most important predictor of votingfor the PRR (see Table 1), and across countries the party family thusdistinguishes itself from other party families on this issue (not just overallbut also vis-à-vis the centre-right voter, as we found in our additionalmultinomial regression models). A second ideological issue that seems todistinguish PRR voters is that those who trust the EU less support PRRparties more (p<0.001). However, the effect of anti-immigrant views exceedsall others.58 A third small effect was found for economic attitudes towardsredistribution: being more economically right-wing is associated with agreater likelihood of voting for PRR parties (p<0.05). However, the multino-mial models demonstrate that voters for centre-right parties are on averageslightly more economically right-wing than PRR voters; in other words, PRRvoters do not radically differ from centre-right voters in this regard, only fromleft-wing voters. Moreover, we also found a possible negative effect ofsupporting economic gender equality (p=0.058). However, the size of theeffect leads us to conclude that these attitudes are not unique to PRR voters.In Model 3, we assess whether the impact of certain attitudes differs by sex.
The main coefficient indicates the effect of the particular attitude on the logodds of voting for a PRR party among men, and the interaction coefficientsindicate the extent to which the relationship is different for women. Takingboth the size and the p-values of the interaction terms into account, we canconclude that the impact of the two core attitudes distilled from Model 2differ little by sex: the interaction terms are not statistically significant and arenegligible relative to the main coefficient. The positive impact on PRR votingof holding anti-immigrant views and distrusting the EU is similar among menand women. In the previous article in this issue, Eelco Harteveld et al. did finddifferent effects for men and women of anti-immigrant views on thepropensity to vote,59 but they were not able to replicate this finding stronglyin their actual vote models. We will come back to this difference in theconclusions. The multinomial models also fail to identify differences.For three other attitudes, we observed noteworthy differences. First, as in
Model 2, there is a positive effect regarding holding a more right-wingeconomic position and voting PRR. Overall, this effect is only significant formen.60 In fact, it is driven by the difference between voting for left-wingparties and the PRR: among women, the effect of economic attitudes and
58 A model that only includes this explanatory variable has a Nagelkerke R squareof 0.149.
59 Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting’.
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voting PRR versus left-wing parties is less pronounced than among men.A further examination of the data (e.g. crosstabs) demonstrates that it isprimarily men with economically right-wing attitudes that vote PRR, whichsuggests that of all left-wing voters, relatively more women than menswitched to the PRR during its rise. Second, authoritarianism-related attitudeshave different effects for men and women. Taking all models into account,it appears that being more pro law and order has a stronger effect on womenthan on men regarding voting for the PRR, but the relationship is notunequivocally positive. The raw data suggest that men and women who
Table 1 Logistic regression models explaining voting for a PRR party
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3
Intercept −2.03*** −3.55*** −3.28***Sex (1=woman) −0.38*** −0.36*** −0.98Opposed to economicredistribution
0.44* 0.59*
* sex −0.45 The main effect is notsignificant for women.
Trust in EU −1.84*** −1.92**** sex 0.23Anti-immigration 4.60*** 4.50**** sex 0.16Law & order 0.27 −0.25* sex 1.28* The main effect is significant
for women.Environmentalprotection
−0.26 −0.15
* sex −0.26Personal freedom &development
0.27 0.18
* sex 0.21Economic genderequality
−0.35# −0.53*
* sex 0.39 The main effect is notsignificant for women.
Homosexuality −0.03 0.16* sex −0.50Chi square 21.07*** 528.34*** 537.35***Nagelkerke R square 0.007 0.158 0.161NTotal 6,733 6,733 6,733N1 670 670 670
# p<0.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<0.001Source: Round 5, ESS
60 This cannot be derived from Model 3 directly; re-estimating this model while changingthe reference category of the sex variable yields the expected coefficient of 0.014 (0.059-0.045) with a p-value well above 0.10.
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value authority to a considerable degree have a similar inclination to votePRR; among those who hold more moderate positions, men are still morelikely to vote PRR. Third, a small negative effect was observed for menregarding their attitudes towards economic gender equality, whereas no sucheffect is found among women. Gender equality attitudes, however, do notmake a difference to voting centre-right or PRR. Gender equality attitudes donot affect women’s voting decisions, but they can draw men towards left-wing parties.We draw two important conclusions based on these pooled models. First,
our models confirm conclusions from previous studies indicating thatnativism is the most important reason for voting PRR, among both womenand men. Moreover, in these data, women holding different attitudes towardsimmigration do not explain the gap between men and women voting for PRRparties. Second, for identifying and understanding the sex gap in voting PRR,it is important to compare PRR voters to the typical centre-right voter andleft-wing voter separately: we find some sex differences and a small impact ofgender equality attitudes (among men), but these differences primarilydistinguish left-wing party voters from PRR voters. In other words, onalmost all issues related to voting PRR (except migration and, arguably, theEU), men and women are very similar to centre-right voters. Technicallyspeaking, they might be radical, but they are not outliers with respect togender and sex. Academically, this might imply that, in order to understandthe sex gap in voting PRR, more attention should be paid to the question ofwhy women vote for the left more often, rather than, as it currently stands, toa false dichotomy between all other parties and the PRR.
The role of sex by country
Table 2 presents the re-estimation of Model 3 for each country separately.Again, we also estimated multinomial models; these results are mentioned ifrelevant. Table 2 shows that several of the overall effects are attributable toone or a few countries, but the results reveal some patterns across all or atleast half of the countries. Here it has to be taken into account that the numberof PRR voters is considerably lower than in the pooled sample, which leads tolower p-values (and fewer chances for statistically significant relationships).First, anti-immigrant attitudes remain the most important factor. The more
anti-immigrant a respondent is, the higher the probability of voting PRRrelative to voting for another party. This effect is substantial and highlysignificant, and no major statistically significant differences between the sexesare observed regarding the impact of this factor. Second, more generally,almost no consistent gender effect is found across countries. Most attitudes donot have different impacts on men and women who actually vote for the PRR,and the gender equality attitudes of voters do not seem to distinguish PRRparties from their left-wing or centre-right counterparts. The effect of
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Table 2 Logistic regression models explaining voting for a PRR party by country
Belgium Denmark France Netherlands Norway Sweden Switzerland All
Intercept −5.67** −4.06*** −4.42** −4.55** −5.14*** −8.24*** −3.23* −3.28***Sex (1=woman) 2.46* −0.26 0.15 −0.39 −0.44 −0.29 1.48# −0.99Opposed to economic redistribution 0.61 −0.20 0.34 −0.92* −0.13 −1.75 1.29* 0.59** sex −3.15# −4.48# −1.98# −0.45Trust in EU 1.15 −2.34* −3.26# 1.40 3.10** 1.51 −1.42 −1.91**** sex 0.23Anti-immigration 5.61*** 6.33*** 5.77*** 6.08*** 5.45*** 8.00*** 4.96*** 4.50**** sex 0.17Law and order −1.39 0.84 0.24 0.68 1.36# −1.64 −0.66# −0.26* sex 1.28*Environmental protection 0.93 −0.44 0.40 −0.80 −1.20 −0.43 0.61 −0.14* sex −3.15* −0.26Personal freedom and development −1.47 0.46 −1.102 −1.04 0.19 −1.86 −0.51 0.18* sex 0.21Economic gender equality 0.17 −0.03 −0.33 0.18 −1.74** 0.56 −1.31* −0.53** sex 2.05# 0.40Homosexuality 0.05 −0.36 0.12 0.35 1.42** 3.76 0.34 0.16* sex −1.59# −2.09* −0.49Chi square 80*** 127*** 66*** 147*** 141*** 70*** 99*** 537***Nagelkerke R square 0.198 0.234 0.227 0.217 0.238 0.281 0.277 0.161NTotal 1,166 1,034 860 1,213 967 984 5125 6,739N1 61 110 43 151 146 31 128 670
# p<0.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<0.001Source: Round 5, ESS
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economic gender equality observed in the pooled models does not hold acrosscountries. The claim from the pooled analysis that men who are more infavour of economic gender equality vote PRR less no longer holds: it seems tobe an artefact of a strong relationship observed only in Norway.Third, once sex differences are accounted for, attitudes towards homosexu-
ality seem important for some groups in at least three countries. The results forthese four countries point in roughly the same direction. In Norway andSwitzerland, a negative interaction effect is detected and this is also the case inthe multinomial model for the Netherlands (and no results in the oppositedirection are found). The results suggest that, in these countries, men withrelatively progressive LG (lesbian and gay) attitudes who would otherwisevote for the left (or centre-right) may be attracted by PRR parties. Given thestrong influence of the anti-immigrant attitudes of PRR voters, it can beexpected that pro-LG equality attitudes do not reflect a generally progressivestance against heteronormativity, but a stance againstmigrants and Islam. Suchattitudes are most likely linked with the growing focus on ‘protectinghomosexuals against the Muslim invasion’.61 Interestingly, this study suggeststhat this strategy is much more effective among men than among women inthese countries. The next section studies this link between nativism and LGemancipation in greater detail.Fourth, the impact of economic attitudes to redistribution seems to differ
between men and women. Differences are observed in Belgium, Norway andSwitzerland (and, in the multinomial models, France). In each of thesecountries, economic right-wing men have a tendency to vote for PRR partiesmore than for left-wing parties (not compared to centre-right parties).However, the interaction terms are negative: moving from being economicallyleft-wing to economically right-wing favours PRR parties to a greater extentamong men than among women. This finding indicates that, among women,those with economic left- and right-wing views vote PRR more often,suggesting that PRR parties have managed to attract women with theirincreasingly more economically left-wing or centre positions; particularly inFrance, left-wing women seem to have been pulled from particularly left-wing parties to the FN. In contrast, the multinomial models also demonstratethat, in Denmark, economically right-wing men tend to vote centre-right, notPRR, whereas no differences were observed among women.The country-specific analyses further confirm our findings. Sex differences
and gender equality attitudes do not seem to be a core or determiningcharacteristic of the PRR party family. As indicated in the pooled analysis, theanti-immigration position of PRR parties and their voters is their maindefining characteristic, and those voting for PRR parties are neither more
61 Akkerman, ‘Gender issues and the radical right in Western Europe’; Sarah Bracke,‘From “saving women” to “saving gays”: rescue narratives and their dis/continuities’,European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2012, 237–52; De Lange and Mügge,‘Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries’; Mudde, ‘The populist radicalright’.
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traditional (anti-gender equality or anti-LG equality), nor do they supportthese issues to a greater extent than the voters of other parties. Nevertheless,the impact of attitudes towards economic redistribution and homosexuality islinked to sex in approximately half of the countries. Thus, there may be twopossible divisions among PRR parties, which may be considered indicative ofpossible sub-families: the PRR party family is united by its anti-immigrantposition, but there are divisions along socio-economic and sexuality issues.One might even go somewhat further and suggest that the sub-families areorganized into ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ (perhaps post-9/11 and post-economiccrisis) PRR parties, whereby the former combine traditionalism and right-wing stances generally, and the latter remain anti-immigrant but on otherissues move more towards the centre, or the centre-left, regarding economicand LG issues. Interestingly, this shift is rather strongly gendered, as the shiftto the socio-economic left seems to attract women (or deter them less), andusing a ‘pro-gay, anti-Islamic’ rhetoric seems to do the same for men that aremore in favour of LG equality. It is possible that the latter may be gay men,who feel threatened by multicultural society and therefore support PRRparties.62
Gendering the impact of other attitudes
Table 3 presents the results of the analyses including interactions betweenattitudes towards economic gender equality or sexual liberalization and theother, non-gender attitudes. These analyses provide further insights into thegenderedness of the PRR, and allow us to analyse the above suggested linkbetween attitudes on LG equality and immigration. To keep the presentationmanageable, we only report the interaction coefficients in the table and only ifthey have a p-value below 0.10.
An examination of the table immediately indicates that very few—5 out ofa possible 84—interactions were found to be statistically significant and, inBelgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, none of the interactions werestatistically significant. This finding supports previous conclusions thatgender is not a core, defining characteristic of PRR parties’ voters. Moreover,2 of these 5 interactions do not seem to be part of a larger pattern: 1) inDenmark, law-and-order positions are important among those who are morepro gender equality, whereas they do not have an effect on the votingbehaviour of those who are less in favour of economic gender equality; and 2)in France, for those who are more supportive of LG emancipation, being lesspro-environment is related to voting PRR, whereas it is not among those whoare less in favour of lesbian and gay emancipation. It is not possible to drawany conclusions from these results.
62 See ‘PVV de grootste onder homo’s’, 9 November 2010, available on the Sargassowebsite at http://sargasso.nl/pvv-de-grootste-onder-homos (viewed 16 February 2015);and ‘“PVV is de grootste partij onder homo’s”’, AD, 9 November 2010.
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Table 3 Interaction coefficients with gender equality (GE) and LG attitudes
Belgium Denmark France Netherlands Norway Sweden Switzerland
GE LG GE LG GE LG GE LG GE LG GE LG GE LG
Opposition to economic redistributionTrust in EUAnti-immigration 5.33* 19.09**Law and order 8.83* 6.81*Environmental protection -6.59*Personal freedom and development
# p<0.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<0.001Source: Round 5, ESS
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However, the last three interactions reveal patterns that tend to conform toour earlier results. In Norway, we found two interactions that indicate similareffects. Among Norwegians who are more ‘pro-gay’, nativist and authorit-arian attitudes have a stronger impact than among Norwegians that are lesssupportive of gays and lesbians. Similarly, we also observe this effect fornativist, anti-immigrant attitudes in Sweden. This pattern might reflectsocietal debates in which the issue of LG rights and equality is framed inthe context of violence and a nationalist discourse that relates it toimmigration (in particular Islam). Those who hold authoritarian and nativistviews in combination with supporting the notion that gay and lesbian peopleshould be able to live their lives as they choose have a disproportionately highlikelihood of voting for the PRR parties in Sweden and Norway relative toany other party.
Mannerparteien or radicalized mainstream parties?
In this study, we find that more men support PRR parties than women, asmany studies have shown before.63 However, the most important reasons thatvoters support PRR parties are the same for men and women: both men andwomen vote PRR because of their opposition to immigration. There are somedifferences between men and women with respect to law-and-order attitudes;however, when disaggregated by country, this difference no longer holds. Ingeneral, there are no consistent cross-country patterns regarding sex, that is,differences between men and women. Tim Immerzeel, Hilde Coffé and Tanjavan der Lippe concluded in an earlier study that socio-economic character-istics, political interest, nativism and authoritarianism were not sufficient forunderstanding the voting gap between women and men across countries.64
We expand on this by confirming their analysis regarding nativism andauthoritarianism, and assessing the impact of other ideological differences aswell, including attitudes towards gender equality. In contrast to the otherdemand-side study in this special issue,65 we do not find a different effect ofnativism between men and women but, whereas we studied the actual vote,they studied vote propensity. It might be that women who are more nativist/anti-immigrant are less inclined to say that they consider voting PRR thanmen, but actually do vote PRR as often. If anything, comparing the resultssuggests that the translation from the propensity to vote PRR to actuallyvoting PRR might be gendered. In this light, both demand-side studies in thisissue show that, in most cases, attitudinal or policy-vote indicators are betterpredictors among men than among women.
63 See, for example, Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe; Norris, RadicalRight; Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.
64 Immerzeel, Coffé and Lippe, ‘Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting’.65 Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populist radical-
right voting’.
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In contrast to Harteveld et al., our analyses not only focus on the overalleffects across Europe, but also look at country-specific relationships to seewhether PRR parties split into different sub-families. This turned out to bequite important as the only substantial sex difference observed in the pooledmodel was context-dependent. In Belgium, France, Norway and Switzer-land, there are indications that attitudes towards economic redistribution doaffect the PRR voting behaviour of men more strongly than women. Thedifference between economically right-wing and left-wing men is that theformer are more inclined to vote PRR vis-à-vis economically left-wingparties. Among women, economic positions matter less: economically left-wing women also vote PRR. This interesting finding might indicate thatwomen actually combine left-wing economic positions with (moderate) anti-immigrant views more often than men, which makes them more receptiveto the welfare chauvinist programmes of PRR parties in these countries.That the effect is not found across countries seems to resemble thedisagreement concerning the role that economic redistribution plays in theideology of and support for the PRR.66 However, while welfare chauvinismis a shared feature among PRR parties, the adherence to redistributivepolicies is generally less common among these parties and does not fullyoverlap with the divide we found. For instance, Anthony McGann andHerbert Kitschelt concluded that the Swiss PRR party (SVP) was not welfarechauvinist in the strict sense.67 One question for future research is whetherthe SVP has developed in this direction between the early 2000s (McGannand Kitschelt’s study) and 2010 (the data used here). The SVP’s moderatelyconservative position on gender equality issues, and its support forChristian values,68 suggests that this may have taken place. A detailedanalysis of this local context is beyond the scope of this study, but it doesseem an interesting avenue for future research.Finally, there is no effect of gender equality attitudes. There is some
evidence, however, that gender issues are important with respect to gayrights. Those who hold authoritarian or nativist views in combination witha strong belief that gays and lesbians should be able to live their lives asthey choose have a disproportionately high likelihood of voting for PRRparties in Sweden and Norway. While this is a novel and interestingfinding, what is more surprising to us, given the growing opposition to
66 See Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe; Derks, ‘Populism and theambivalence of egalitarianism’; Ivarsflaten, ‘The vulnerable populist right parties’;Ivarsflaten, ‘What unites right-wing populists in Western Europe?’; Daniel Oesch,‘Explaining workers’ support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe:evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland’, InternationalPolitical Science Review, vol. 29, no. 3, 2008, 349–73.
67 McGann and Kitschelt, ‘The radical right in the Alps’.68 Akkerman, ‘Gender issues and the radical right in Western Europe’.
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Islam among PRR parties, is that this finding does not hold for more of thecountries.69
Where does this analysis leave us regarding sex and gender and voting forthe PRR? One conclusion is that it is incorrect to refer to PRR parties as men’sparties (Männerparteien). While it is the case that more men than women votefor PRR parties, we also conclude that this difference, coupled with theattitudes of supporters, is not substantial enough to warrant this label.Clearly, while we find some evidence at the country level that PRR partiesattract women with more left-wing economic views and nativist attitudes(that is, in the left authoritarian quadrant70), there is also evidence of aqueering effect regarding gay and lesbian issues combined with nativistattitudes in two countries. The question is: does this phenomenon relate tosupply-side issues? That is, is the PRR more welfare chauvinist in Belgium,France, Norway and Switzerland, and more emancipatory nativist in Norwayand Sweden? The context specificity of voter-level relationships asks forfuture comparative research that connects the local context and demand sideof PRR politics more systematically. Moreover, an interesting question is: whoare the voters that are supportive of gay issues while also being nativist? It ispossible that they are gay men. Additional research is needed to answer thesequestions, and the results for both the sexuality issues and economic positionof people are strong indications of a need for more intersectional analyses ofPRR politics, also on the demand side.71
To conclude, we paraphrase Cas Mudde.72 Mudde argues that radical-rightparties are often analysed through the lens of what he refers to as the normalpathological thesis: that is, PRR parties are regarded as an ordinary patholo-gical response to socio-economic and political developments. In contrast, heargues that PRR parties should be regarded as a pathological normalcy, that is,a ‘radical interpretation ofmainstream values’.73 The underlying assumption isthat it is perhaps time to consider PRR parties less as abnormal parties, partiesthat should be treated differently from other political parties, such asmainstream parties (centre-right and centre-left) or new parties such as Greenparties for that matter. In this article, we come to similar conclusions. This lineof reasoning might actually offer an explanation for why the so-called ‘gendergap’ among voters is in reality smaller than often suggested, and the
69 For a supply-side analysis, see Betz and Meret, ‘Revisiting Lepanto’; Akkerman,‘Gender issues and the radical right in Western Europe’; De Lange and Mügge, ‘Genderand right-wing populism in the Low Countries’.
70 Wouter van der Brug and Joost van Spanje, ‘Immigration, Europe and the “new”cultural dimension’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 48, no. 3, 2009, 309–34.
71 For the application of intersectionality to quantitative studies, including voting studies,see Niels Spierings, ‘The inclusion of quantitative techniques and diversity in themainstream of feminist research’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 19, no. 3,2012, 331–47.
72 Mudde, ‘The populist radical right’.73 Ibid., 1167.
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masculinity of PRR parties is often overemphasized. Moreover, our analysisindicates that the ideological development of PRR parties might even further‘demasculinize’ or normalize them, tempting more women to vote PRR:namely, the women that show such an inclination (a high ‘propensity to vote’)but do not vote PRR yet.74 In other words, it appears that PRR parties, withrespect to sex and gender, are in many ways simply a more radical version ofcentre-right parties.
Niels Spierings is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Radboud University inNijmegen, with specializations in political and gender sociology. His researchincludes work on women’s economic and political participation, religion(Islam in particular), migration, social media, intersectionality and researchmethods. He mainly studies European and Muslim-majority societies. He haspublished in international journals such as European Journal of Women’sStudies, Feminist Economics, GENÉROS, Political Behavior, Politics & Religionand Electoral Studies. He has been visiting fellow at the London School ofEconomics and Political Science, where part of the research for this issue wasconducted. Email: [email protected]
Andrej Zaslove is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in theDepartment of Political Science, Institute for Management Research atRadboud University. His research interests focus on populism, the radicalright and immigration. He has published in journals such as ComparativePolitical Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and ComparativeEuropean Politics. Email: [email protected]
74 See Harteveld, van der Brug, Dahlberg and Kokkenen, ‘The gender gap in populistradical-right voting’.
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Appendix Party classification for multinomial models
Country PRR Centre right Centre left
Belgium Vlaams Belang (VB)Front National2
Christen-Democratischen Vlaams (CD&V)
Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie(NV-A)
Lijst Dedecker (LDD)Vlaamse Liberalen enDemocraten (OpenVLD)
MouvementRéformateur (MR)
Parti Populaire
GroenSocialistische PartijAnders (SP.A)
Partij van de Arbeid vanBelgië/ Parti duTravail de Belgique(PVDA/PTB)
Centre DémocrateHumaniste (CDH)3
EcoloParti Socialiste (PS)
Denmark Dansk Folkeparti (DF) Det KonservativeFolkeparti (KFP)
KristendemokraterneVenstre, DanmarksLiberale Parti (DLP)
Ny Alliance4
Socialdemokraterne(SD)
Det Radikale Venstre(RV)
Socialistisk Folkeparti(SFP)
Enhedslisten, De Rød-Grønne (Enhl)
France Front national (FN) Chasse, pêche, natureet traditions (CPNT)
Mouvement pour laFrance (MPF)
Nouveau centre (NC)Mouvement démocrate(MoDem)
Union pour unmouvement populaire(UMP)
Union pour ladémocratie française(UDF)
Autres mouvementsecologistes5
Diverse droite
Ligue communisterévolutionnaire (LCR)
Lutte ouvrière (LO)Parti communistefrançais (PCF)
Parti socialiste (PS)Parti radical de gauche(PRG)
Les VertsDivers gauche
Netherlands Partij voor de Vrijheid(PVV)
TON (List Verdonk)2
Volkspartij voor Vrijheiden Democratie (VVD)
Christen DemocratischAppèl (CDA)
ChristenUnie (CU)StaatkundigGereformeerde Partij
Partij van de Arbeid(PvdA)
Socialistische Partij(SP)
Demokraten 66 (D66)GroenLinks (GL)Partij voor de Dieren
Norway Fremskrittspartiet(FrP)
Venstre (V)Kristelig Folkeparti (KrF)Senterpartiet (Sp)Høyre (H)Kystpartiet
Rød ValgallianseSosialistiskVenstreparti (SV)
Det NorskeArbeiderparti (Ap)
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Appendix (continued)
Country PRR Centre right Centre left
Sweden Sverigedemokraterna(SD)
Centerpartiet (C)Folkpartiet liberalerna(FPL)
Kristdemokraterna (KD)Moderatasamlingspartiet (MSP)
Junilistan
Miljöpartiet de gröna(MPG)
Sverigessocialdemokratiskaarbetareparti (SAP)
Vänsterpartiet (VP)Feministiskt initiativ
Switzerland SchweizerischeVolkspartei (SVP)
Lega dei Ticinesi2
EidgenössischeDemokratischeUnion (EDU)2
Freisinnig-Demokratische Partei(FDP)
ChristlichdemokratischeVolkspartei (CVP)
Liberale Partei derSchweiz (LPS)
Christlich-soziale Partei(CSP)
Grünliberale Partei derSchweiz (GLP)
Schweizer Demokraten(SD)
EvangelischeVolkspartei (EVP)
SozialdemokratischePartei der Schweiz(SPS)
Grüne Partei derSchweiz (GPS)
Partei der Arbeit derSchweiz (PdA)
Notes1) The classifications in this table was checked with country experts.2) The parties in italics are minor PRR parties and none has received votes from more than 4 people inthe ESS data; they are not included in the models.3) The Walloon Christian Democrats are an exception in the European party family of Christiandemocrats, as they are considered more left-wing, not only on economic issues but also on culturalissues such as migration and gay marriage. In 2014 they also did not negotiate with the other centre-right parties to form a government while the Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams (the Flemish ChristianDemocrats) did.4) In the ESS, the label ‘Ny Alliance’ is still used, while the party actually changed its name in 2008.Since then it has been called the Liberal Alliance.5) Green parties are generally classified as left-wing parties, but these ‘other greens’ (other than LesVerts, which is actually left-wing) will probably refer to the two other relevant Green parties in France:CAP21 and MEI (Mouvement écologiste independent). The first is centre-right; the second positionsitself as bridging the left-right divide. Overall they fit the centre-right category better. However, MEI didgo into an alliance with the left in 2012. Reclassifying these 19 cases changes the coefficients only inthe third digit behind the decimal.
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