How do far-right populist parties adapt their gender rhetoric across different political landscapes? Reinhardt, Heft, and Pavan (2024) analyze how populist radical right parties (PRRPs) weaponize gender issues on social media to drive gendered democratic backsliding.
The authors evaluate how context-specific “gendered opportunity structures”—shaped by national levels of gender contestation, legal protections, party trajectories, and voter resonance—influence communication strategies. Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament election campaign, the study conducts a quantitative content analysis and constructs topic networks from the Facebook and Twitter feeds of three prominent parties: Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Italy’s Lega, and the Sweden Democrats. Through these networks, the authors track the salience of gender debates, the broader thematic contexts in which they are embedded, and specific party positions.
The findings reveal that national conditions heavily dictate party framing. In settings where gender and sexual equality enjoy high public acceptance and strong legal protections, parties tend to rely on femonationalist framing—instrumentalizing gender equality rhetoric against external outgroups and immigrants while muting overt anti-gender hostility. In contrast, in contexts where equality protections are weaker and public contestation is higher, parties openly mobilize antigenderist rhetoric to challenge progressive norms. Despite these national variations, a shared femonationalist discourse bridges all three parties transnationally, rooted in a common nativist ideological core.
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Reinhardt, S., Heft, A., & Pavan, E. (2024). Varieties of antigenderism: The politicization of gender issues across three European populist radical right parties. Information, Communication & Society, 27(7), 1273–1294. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2246536