Angry White Women? The Radical Right Gender Gap Revisited

• In Event: Identity, Populism, and the Gender Gap in Vote Choice

Abstract

Over the last years, the rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) has attracted considerable political and scholarly attention. Until recently, one of the most consistent empirical findings about PRRPs was the “radical right gender gap” - men tended to vote for populist radical right parties in greater numbers than women (Givens 2004; Mudde 2013). However, recent political science research has shown much greater cross-country variation in the radical right gender gap than previously assumed. In some cases, the radical right gender gap has not just closed, but reversed (Harteveld et al 2015; Mayer 2015b). Have women started supporting populist radical right parties in greater numbers? And if so, why?
I examine how the use of gender-immigration frames by PRRPs, meaning the mention of immigration with explicit reference to women, influences women’s propensity to vote for a PRRP. By systematically linking gender equality concerns to immigration, PRRPs have started presenting themselves as the “true defenders of women’s rights”, stating for example that “the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights” (Marine Le Pen, 2016 quoted in Lang, 2016).
I argue that the use of gender-immigration frames affects women’s voting behaviour by making pre-existing immigration attitudes more salient (Eagly and Chaiken 1993). While female voters might be no less authoritarian and anti-immigrant than men (Spierings and Zaslove 2017), these beliefs were not as important in structuring women’s vote choice in the past (Mayer 2015). Exposure to gender-immigration frames might lead female voters to feel more directly affected by these issues and might thus encourage them to give greater weight to their immigration preferences when making vote choices.
Using data from two original survey experiments conducted in Germany and the UK, I show that new gendered immigration messages used by PRRPs can indeed encourage women to express higher anti-immigration sentiment, as well as support for PRRPs. These findings have important implications for the literature on gender and the populist radical right, as well as our broader understanding of the links between framing, issue salience and preference expression.

Author

• Katharina Lawall, London School of Economics