THE ANTAGONISTIC ALLURE: A Quantitative Study of Women’s Support for Right Wing Populist Parties in Europe

Abstract

Right-wing populism remains the fastest-growing party family in Europe, and whilst studying its support, previous research has largely focused on the male cohort. Despite men being the archetype for right-wing populist supporters, women show an increased support for the party-family as well. This occurs in tandem with women moving further to the left side of the political spectrum whilst men move further to the right. The contradicting nature of female support for right-wing populism prompted this thesis’ research problem. This thesis investigated the relationship between threat perception, respectively traditional gender ideals, and female support for right-wing populism. The study was carried out through a multilevel logistic regression analysis, where data from the European Social Survey 11th wave was employed as this wave specifically focuses on gender in contemporary Europe. A total of 22 countries, all of which European, were included in this study. The results captured a positive and significant relationship between female support for right-wing populism and the main predictors, both in the threat perception and traditional gender ideals models. These findings, together with the likelihood ratios tests and marginal analyses warranted this thesis to accept both of its hypotheses. Hence, women who express high levels of threat perception, and subscribe to traditional gender ideals have a higher likelihood of supporting right-wing populist parties in Europe. This study contributes to existing research on right-wing populism, especially in regard to female support, as this cohort has been overlooked and mostly treated as a residual or control variable.