Masculinity, sexism and populist radical right support

Abstract

IntroductionThe gender gap in populist radical right voting—with women being less likely to support populist radical right parties than men—is well-established. Much less is known about the interplay between gender, masculinity and populist radical right voting. This study investigates the extent to which masculinity affects women and men's likelihood of supporting populist radical right parties. Focusing on sexism as a link between masculinity and populist radical right support, we put forward two mechanisms that operate at once: a mediating effect of sexism (sexism explains the association between masculinity and populist radical right voting) and a moderating effect of sexism (the impact of masculinity is stronger among citizens scoring high on sexism compared with citizens with low levels of sexist attitudes).MethodsWe draw on an original dataset collected in Spain at the end of 2020 to investigate support for the Spanish populist radical right party VOX.ResultsWe find support for hypothesized mechanisms, mediation and moderation, chiefly among men. First, sexism explains about half of the link between masculinity and populist radical right support for this group, confirming the hypothesized mediation effect. Second, masculinity has a significantly stronger impact on the likelihood of supporting VOX among men scoring high on sexism, which in turn substantiates the presence of a moderation effect.DiscussionExisting research so far has examined the empirical connections between how individuals perceive their levels of masculinity, sexism, and PRR voting separately. Our study offers a first step in unpacking the relationship between masculinity and PRR support by focusing specifically on how sexism relates to both these variables.

Antifeminist Sentiments and Marital Desire among Young Men: Evidence from South Korea

“…Younger men have a higher tendency to believe that society discriminates against men over women in the United Kingdom (Green and Shorrocks 2023) and Korea (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family 2021). Recent scholarly work has also established a connection between antifeminist sentiments and recent political trends, including the support for Donald Trump in the United States (Carian and Sobotka 2018;Glick 2019;Godbole, Malvar, and Valian 2019), Yoon Seok-yeol in South Korea (Kim and Lee 2022), Brexit in the United Kingdom (Green and Shorrocks 2023), and the populist radical right party in Spain (Anduiza and Rico 2022;Coffe et al 2023).…”