Why Do Women Vote Radical Right? Benevolent Sexism, Representation and Inclusion in Four Countries

ABSTRACT

Examines how gender, benevolent sexism, and the representational context shapes support for radical right parties (RRPs) in four countries: Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway. Employing the 8th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), we find benevolent sexism is a key component of RRP support for men but not women. For men, it appears that sexist attitudes are at least partly a function of a more general orientation to outgroups. We also find that gender moderates the effects of immigration anxiety and authoritarian attitudes on an RRP vote. Finally, there is some evidence that the gender gap is largest where mainstream parties isolate an RRP and the gap is partly a function of the inability of RRPs to attract women with less progressive views on gender equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical right
• gender gap
• benevolent sexism
• women’s representation
• authoritarianism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Heiko Giebler and Annika Werner as the editors of this special issue and organisers of the workshop on representation and populism for their helpful comments and feedback on the manuscript. We would also like to thank the other participants at the workshop in Berlin and the anonymous reviewers as well as members of the research group on Political Extremism and Democracy at Simon Fraser University (aka, the #Superfriends) for their feedback, which has helped strengthen the study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Vanna Lodders is a Master’s student in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University who recently completed her undergraduate Honours thesis on the gender gap in far-right voting in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Steven Weldon is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Public Opinion and Political Representation at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on political representation, political behavior, and the rise in the radical right across democracies. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, and West European Politics. E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1 Harteveld and Ivarsflaten (2018) refer to this legitimation due to inclusiveness as a ‘reputational shield’. While they argue that other factors may contribute to a party’s reputational shield, we believe that the isolation versus inclusion distinction is a good way to operationalize this concept.

2 We also initially examined the moderating effects for left-right ideology. See note 4.

3 Non-voters are coded as NA.

4 All models were estimated with post-stratification and population weights.

5 As indicated in note 2, we also tested for an interaction between gender and left-right ideology. While it was statistically significant (p < .10), the inclusion of this term did not improve the model fit once controlling for interactions with immigration anxiety and authoritarian values. Given the correlations among the three and the already complex models, we dropped it from the final results. It is available upon request from the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported with a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight grant number [#435-2016-0428].