Far-right cooperation: Gender, political networks, and the cordon sanitaire in the European Parliament

Abstract

Even as the far-right parties of Western Europe have made broad electoral gains, mainstream parties continue to enact a cordon sanitaire, effectively curtailing their legislative impact. Any potential ability of women far-right politicians to cooperate across party lines would open up important political opportunities not available for them within the far right. This article seeks to address the following question: are women of the far right able to cooperate with members of other political parties in ways that their men colleagues cannot? Using a network analysis of motion co-authorship across three sessions of the European Parliament, I find that there is a double marginalization of far-right women politicians – as women in far-right politics, and as far-right politicians in the European Parliament – which results in women politicians who lack influence within their parties, and within the European Parliament more broadly.