Women in politics

Do young women and men join political parties for different reasons? To investigate, we theorize the following: first, women will be more attracted by social incentives and men by material ones, while purposive incentives will be equally appealing to both; second, before signing up, women will have more party-affiliatedfamily ties than men; and third, these ties will moderate the gender gap in incentives. Drawing on original survey data from over 3,500 youth wing members of the main center-left and center-right parties in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we find strong support for our argument. Our results show that, already in this early – but crucial – part of the pipeline to power, the incentives for joining parties are gendered: young women are more mobilized by social benefits, and less so by material ones. In addition, they are more likely than men to have party-affiliated family ties, indicating that these resources are particularly valuable to them in overcoming the disadvantages they face when entering politics. Notably, family ties boost women’s purposive motivations more than men’s, but they also reduce women’s material motivations to a greater extent. Our findings suggest that if parties are interested in recruiting more young women, they should emphasize the social rewards of membership in their recruitment campaigns.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have long been characterised as ‘men’s parties’ due to the overrepresentation of men among their voters and grassroots members. While the gender gap among voters has been extensively investigated, little is known about the extent to which women participate at the grassroots of these parties. My book examines this by asking: How does gender shape the experience of PRR party membership? To do so, it looks both at the ‘supply-side’ of PRR party membership, assessing whether women and men differ in their motivations for joining, motivations for staying, and participation in party activities; and the ‘demand-side’, exploring if PRR parties adopt distinct recruitment and retention strategies for women and men. I focus on three PRR parties which have had profound influence on the politics and societies of their countries: the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the League in Italy, and the Sweden Democrats. The book draws on a vast collection of original qualitative and quantitative data which includes interviews with over 100 party members and officials from the three parties, in addition to membership surveys of thousands of members of the League and the Sweden Democrats. Arguing that women PRR grassroots members play a central role in the organisational development, electoral expansion and growing normalisation of the populist radical right, this volume casts light on one of the defining political phenomena of our century.

Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power in parliamentary democracies, but have been overlooked by gender and politics scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using original survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, we find that women are more likely than men to report increased desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates – the latter especially in center-right youth wings. Moreover, the more exposed members are to the youth wing, the larger the gender gaps in the acquisition of efficacy and ambition. Our results suggest that, insofar as women’s political socialization is concerned, youth wings can be forces of renovation within their parties.

Do voters perceive women candidates of the far right as more democratic and socially acceptable than men candidates of the far right? If so, far-right parties may strategically use women candidates to appear as legitimate and ‘normal’ actors in the eyes of voters, thereby reducing the stigma they face. Building on the literature on gender stereotypes and candidates, we theorise that voters perceive women far-right candidates as more cooperative, empathetic, respectful of rules and moderate – and therefore, more socially acceptable and more likely to behave in line with democratic principles – than men far-right candidates. This should be the case even when candidates explicitly favour positions that strongly break with the principles of liberal and electoral democracy. To test this, we run an original online vignette survey experiment in Germany (N = 3,881), where the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is still relatively stigmatised compared to its counterparts in other European countries. We find that, overall, women AfD candidates are perceived as more socially acceptable than their men counterparts, but not as more democratic. However, when they engage in anti-immigration rhetoric, women candidates are perceived as more democratic. Our findings bring a novel gender perspective to the literature on far-right normalisation and legitimisation, showing that women are key actors in both these processes.