No abstract

Men are overrepresented in most legislatures of the world. However, in parliaments in which women reach a “critical mass” or even approach parity with men in terms of numbers, they still must contend with and adapt to the symbolic representation of men. Using the cases of the Australian and Polish parliaments, we point to the need to deconstruct the parliamentary standard by shifting the theoretical and empirical focus from women's disadvantage in politics to problematizing men's advantage and power (Eveline 1994, 1998; Murray 2014). Rather than placing the problem and solution with women, we address the practices that maintain men's unearned power, or privilege. Privilege is the “systematically conferred advantages” that individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership of a dominant social group (Bailey 1998, 109). Institutions in the form of taken-for-granted practices and gendered discourses embed a “masculine blueprint” in political institutions that legitimizes men's place as parliamentarians and privileges men, enhancing their power and advantage in the election process. By focusing on men's dominance, it becomes evident that sustaining gender inequality through practices and discourse advantages men as a group.

There is a notable gap in the academic literature on racism within European Union institutions. This article scrutinizes racism and normative whiteness in one of these institutions—namely, the European Parliament. The article asks how European whiteness, as a norm, is related to and sustains racism in the European Parliament and how this affects efforts to tackle racism and formulate internal antiracist practices within the institution. The research material consists of interviews, parliamentary ethnography, and official document data, and the empirical analysis is divided into three levels: individual, political group, and parliamentary. An important contribution is to demonstrate the techniques of reproducing whiteness as an institutional norm and racialized power relations in the European Parliament. This avoids linking racism to only the actions and attitudes of individuals and enables the article to address how racism is reproduced through the Parliament as an institution.

This article investigates how democratic backsliding has affected Europeanizing gender equality institutions. It analyzes Polish public discourse on the Plenipotentiary for Equality, a policy agency that aims to promote gender equality and antidiscrimination. The article traces its framing and trajectories through European Union accession, until the ultraconservative and nationalist backlash in recent years. Post-2015, Polish governments have mainstreamed anti-gender equality rhetoric as a strategy to legitimize systemic changes and democratic backsliding. I demonstrate how discursive and institutional linkages between Europeanization, democratization, and gender equality allow not only progress, but can also lead to opportunity moments for democratic and equality backsliding.

Despite being dissimilar cases, both Poland and Russia exhibit strong anti-liberal and democratic backsliding tendencies. Concomitantly, politicians are spreading a demographic moral panic, employing the argument that both nations are in danger of demise. There is scaremongering concerning below-replacement population growth rates and, in parallel, a tightening grasp on reproductive health rights and a growing fear of non-binary gender identities, people of color, and homosexuality. The political anti-gender mobilization in Poland in the 2010s and the gendered anti-Western and anti-gay conspiracy narratives in Russia are examples of this phenomenon. How are the policy responses to “demographic crises” constructed and gendered in political discourses today? What lies behind it and what is its role in illiberal politics? In this article, I discuss the current demographic discourses in Poland and in Russia. I argue that the politics of rallying against “demographic crises” surfaced on the wave of growing dominance of ultraconservative and nationalist discourses in East-Central Europe in response to perceived socio-economic pressures. I demonstrate how Polish and Russian politicians have been utilizing nativism, familialism, and “tradition” discourses for reasons of political legitimacy and expediency. Looking at political debates and concrete demographic strategies, I trace how the rhetoric of “democratic crises” is deployed to shore up illiberalism in both countries.