Gender and populist radical-right politics: an introduction

Spierings, Niels; Zaslove, Andrej; Mügge, Liza; Lange, Sarah

doi:10.1080/0031322x.2015.1023642

Cited by 79 publications

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“…In other words, the question is: why do PRR parties receive more male than female support? In seeking an answer to this question, we start with the abundant literature on the so-called PRR gender gap (see Spierings and Zaslove 2015b;Spierings et al 2015). This literature suggests two main explanations for the gender gap: first, the difference is due to socio-economic position, and second, it is due to programmatic attitudes, most notably anti-immigration and law and order attitudes (Harteveld et al 2015;Immerzeel et al 2015;Spierings and Zaslove 2015b).…”

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“…In the factor analysis, we included a multitude of related items that are not per se related to populism, including political attitudes focusing on internal political efficacy, political interest, closeness to a political party, political trust, and the idea that politics and people constitute opposites. The latter two tap into the theoretical concept of a thin-centred populist ideology Mudde 2004;Spierings et al 2015), and indeed the six items 8 that relate to 'trust' and 'political opposites' all load on one and the same factor (factor loadings > 0.670). The fact that the other items do not load on the same factor indicates that these six items measure populist attitudes -attitudes that focus on the tension between politicians and political institutions on the one hand and ordinary citizens on the other hand.…”

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Gender, populist attitudes, and voting: explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties

Spierings

Zaslove

2017

West European Politics

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137

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Empirical studies have demonstrated that compared to almost all other parties, populist radical right (PRR) parties draw more votes from men than from women. However, the two dominant explanations that are generally advanced to explain this disparity -gender differences regarding socio-economic position and lower perceptions regarding the threat of immigrants -cannot fully explain the difference. The article contends that it might actually be gender differences regarding the conceptualisation of society and politics -populist attitudesthat explain the gender gap. Thus, the gap may be due, in part, to differences in socialisation. The article analyses EES 2014 data on voting for the populist radical right and the populist radical left in nine European countries. Across countries, the gender gap in voting for the PRR is indeed partly explained by populist attitudes. For populist radical left parties, the results are less clear, suggesting that populism has different meanings to voters on the left and on the right. KEYWORDS populism; gender gap; voting behaviour; populist radical right; left-wing populism; europeThe electoral success of populist parties does not seem to subside. In fact, it appears that the opposite is true: in addition to the continuing success of populist radical right parties (PRR), in recent years, there has also been a surge in populist (radical) left parties. Recent examples include Podemos in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece, Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, 1 the Dutch Socialistische Partij, and Die Linke in Germany. The continued, and perhaps even growing, success of populist parties presents us with an interesting question: why do voters continue to support populist parties?CONTACT niels spierings n.spierings@maw.ru.nl OPEN ACCESS 822 N. SPIERINGS AND A. ZASLOVEResearch in the last 10 to 15 years has provided answers to this question. Reasons for the support for the populist radical right are found in opposition to immigration (e.g. Immerzeel 2015;Lubbers et al. 2002;Norris 2005;Spierings and Zaslove 2015b), lower levels of trust in political institutions (Norris 2005) and being less well educated, younger, and male (Harteveld et al. 2015;Immerzeel 2015;Spierings and Zaslove 2015b). In contrast, supporters of the populist radical left are marginally more supportive of economic equality than supporters of other parties (Visser et al. 2014). The socio-economic profile of (populist) radical left parties is, however, less clear. Visser et al. (2014) show that those with lower incomes and those who are unemployed are more likely to possess a radical left ideology. Ramiro (2016) finds that those who identify with the working class are more likely to support radical left parties. Education is, however, more complicated: both less well and more highly educated voters are attracted to the radical left (Ramiro 2016). Nevertheless, there is a quality that the populist radical right and populist left parties have in common: their populist attitudes .Despite our growing knowledge of why voters support the ...

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Gender, populist attitudes, and voting: explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties

Spierings

Zaslove

2017

West European Politics

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137

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“…This perspective is inspired by Häusermann, Picot, and Geering (2012), who stretch the meaning of the concept 'welfare chauvinism' to the exclusion from social benefits of a broader group of outsiders of the labour market: not only migrants, but also women and perhaps even other non-traditional workers like self-employed and temp workers. The electoral preferences that are associated with 'welfare nostalgia' are not necessarily racist or xenophobic, but need to be interpreted in a wider perspective of 'modernisation losers' (see for instance Minkenberg, 2003;Rydgren, 2007) and traditional gender roles (see Akkerman, 2015a;Spiering, Zaslove, Mügge, & De Lange, 2015). Following Bezt (1994), the modernisation losers can be understood as those who are unable to cope with the 'acceleration of economic, social and cultural modernisation' and/or are stuck in full or partial unemployment, run the risk of falling into the new underclass and of becoming 'superfluous and useless' for society (Rydgren, 2007, p. 248;quotes from Bezt 1994, p. 32).…”

Section: Prrp's and Their Social Agendasmentioning

confidence: 99%

The social policy agendas of populist radical right parties in comparative perspective

Fenger

2018

J. int. comp. soc. policy

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In many European countries and in the US, populist right-wing parties are gaining ground. The political agenda of these parties is dominated by their reluctant or even out-right hostile position against migration and foreigners and a strong emphasis on nationalist values in combination with an anti-globalisation economic agenda. In most cases, the social agenda of the radical right parties and politicians are more ambiguous and less clearly explicated. These parties rely on working class ‘insiders’ and therefore may be expected to oppose austerity measures, but at that same time have firm opinions about deservingness and conditionality that may sometimes harm the interests of their voters. This article sets out to explore the social policy agenda of radical right parties in six different countries: the US, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. The article uses content analysis of speeches and party manifestos as its main method of data analysis.

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“…This indeed illustrates both the growth and the strength of the field of gender and politics. The special issue does not, most notably, address the specific issues of the decline of parties, presidentialization, parties and the media, and the rise of antiwomen parties (Spierings et al, 2015). Political science remains a male-dominated and masculinized discipline, even as gender and politics scholarship has burgeoned in the last decade or so.…”

Section: Gender Studies Finlandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regendering party politics

Celis

Childs

Kantola³

2016

Party Politics

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, 1993). The aim of their volume was to explain how gender has affected party politics and how the imperatives of party politics influence the patterns of women's political representation (Lovenduski, 1995: 3). The book offered 'detailed and upto-date accounts of developments in 11 countries' and demonstrated 'the complexity of the party systems through which feminists are pursuing political change (Party Politics)'.1 GPP was rightly lauded in a review published in Political Studies for establishing 'a significant framework for future research in this underdeveloped area of political study'. Organized by country specific chapters, GPP delivered rich accounts of women's participation in the party political process (Political Quarterly). The introduction and conclusion augmented these, having already and comprehensively informed each chapter's approach, to provide substantial systematic comparison -in this, it was regarded as a model 'of what an edited collection of essays of this kind should be' (Democratization). It is no over-exaggeration to say that it influenced the subsequent generations of politics and gender scholars, a resource many of us picked up as the first port of call and an early key text for the teaching of comparative gender and politics.Re-reading GPP, we are struck by just how much of the contemporary foci of gender and politics researchpolitical recruitment and political careers, descriptive representation and gender quotas, substantive and symbolic representation, framing -were addressed back then in ways that revealed their interconnections rather than treating them as discrete areas of research. GPP has aged rather well. Lovenduski's statement that (Lovenduski, 1995, cited in Krook and Childs, 2010: 83) 'an implicit goal of feminist infiltration of parties is to secure changes in attitudes about gender, mainly by increases in understanding and awareness of gender differences and their implications for power relations', made clear that women's engagement with political parties was never just about the simple inclusion of women -the first dimension of feminization (Lovenduski, 2005) -but also about feminizing parties' programmes and by implication governments, the second dimension of feminization. Diversity among women was acknowledged: Norris and Lovenduski write that 'feminists have disagreed sharply about the nature of women's interests', reminding us that the recognition of women's heterogeneity is not so very recent concern. Similarly, its reflections on the determinants of political change underpin the contemporary institutional turn (feminist and discursive) in gender and politics research. Women's agency -or more precisely feminists' agency -is centred (see Dahlerup and Leyenaar, 2013). As the review published in Democratization emphasized: 'You [women] won't get anything, if you don't go on demanding it'. Encouragingly, GPP offered a rosy future with its 'generally encouraging message, in highlighting women's continuous, if uneven, political advance'.This special issue, coming som...

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Gender and populist radical-right politics: an introduction

Cited by 79 publications

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Gender, populist attitudes, and voting: explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties

Gender, populist attitudes, and voting: explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties

The social policy agendas of populist radical right parties in comparative perspective

Regendering party politics

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