Gender, Families, and the Rise of Populism

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The shift to the right and to populist agendas in the western world -including the United States and parts of Latin America and Europe- reflects a possible and plausible response to unregulated capitalism, globalization and the technological revolution that displaces workers and renders skills obsolete. In addition to the attack on liberalism, immigrants and regional and global multilateralism, the other common thread in this agenda is a backlash against gendered and feminist perspectives and a cry for the return to "traditional family values".
In this roundtable, drawing on five research projects (four recently completed and one that is ongoing) on gender, families and politics, we discuss the intersection of changing gender relations and family structures within an increasingly unequal world on the one hand, and their political drivers and political effects, including the rise of populism, on the other hand. Drawing on projects that span the United States, Latin America and Western Europe, we discuss political polarization and populism, and the social and gendered bases of these phenomena. We focus, specifically, on the role of the family in these broader processes.
The panelists’ research projects highlight the interactive effects of gender and socioeconomic inequalities in the United States and Latin America, which has produced a truncated (ie both incomplete and segmented) revolution in gender and family patterns. Based on their research projects, the panelists will address and discuss the following broad question:
*What is the relationship between this truncated revolution in gender and family patterns and the current political backlash –both political polarization and the rise of populism?
In answering this question, the panelists will both identify the main manifestations of the truncated revolution, as seen in their research, and then discuss the implications for politics, including and especially polarization and the rise of populism.
Fernando Filgueira, co-producer of the UN Women Progress of Women in Latin America Report (2017), will discuss the implications of the report’s key findings –the deep interaction between gender and socioeconomic inequalities, in the most unequal region in the world- for the current rightward shift in Latin America, including the rise of populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro.
Maxine Eichner, author of the forthcoming The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored) (Oxford, 2019), discusses in her book how the U.S. expectation that families must arrange the circumstances they need privately, without help from the government, has impacted the wellbeing of American families and undermined the promise of America’s defining myth, the American Dream. In doing so, she’ll link America’s family policy with the current democratic crisis in the United States.
Jonathan Weiler, co-author (with Marc Hetherington) of Prius or Pickup? (Houghton-Mifflin, 2018) and Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge, 2009; winner of the 2016 Philip Converse Prize in Political Behavior, for books that have made a major impact on the field), will discuss the main findings of his book: childrearing attitudes have become the best predictor of voting behavior in the United States over the past two decades. Weiler will discuss new research that shows that these attitudes predict not only voting behavior in the United States, but also voting for far-right parties in continental Europe, for Brexit in the UK, and for Bolsonaro in Brazil. He will also discuss how attitudes about gender, sexuality and family structure fold into and reinforce the larger political divide.

Merike Blofield, Co-Lead Author (with Filgueira) of the “Pluralization of Families” chapter of the International Panel on Social Progress (Cambridge, 2018), and co-author (with Filgueira), of Fathers, Families and States: Social Transformation and Political Responses in the Western World (book manuscript) will discuss the interaction of class and gender inequalities and changing family composition, their impact on men and fathers, and political reactions by men and fathers, across the Western world.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 31: Women and Politics Research

Chair

• Louise K. Davidson-Schmich University of Miami

Presenters

• Maxine Eichner University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Fernando Filgueira None

• Jonathan Weiler

• Merike Blofield University of Miami