Gender Culture Wars in Public Opinion: Survey Evidence on Anti-Gender Backlash, Policy Conflict, and Electoral Dynamics

Abstract

Across Western democracies, gender has become one of the core cultural conflict dimensions in electoral politics. Gender equality is no longer an uncontested normative horizon; instead, it is actively politicised, moralised, and turned into a partisan identity marker. This is especially true across European party systems, where anti-gender actors have successfully reframed feminist gains and gender equality reforms as cultural threats. While this transformation has been extensively analysed in discourse and party strategy, we know substantially less about how citizens themselves form, update, and mobilise gender attitudes in this conflict. The public opinion foundations of the anti-gender backlash remain undertheorised and insufficiently measured — limiting our capacity to explain both attitudinal polarisation and its electoral consequences. This panel brings together four papers that directly address this gap, using survey data from Austria and Germany, as well as cross-national comparative datasets. The papers analyse (a) how anti-gender attitudes and sexism are structured; (b) how they change or become politically activated over time; (c) how they relate to concrete policy evaluations (e.g. bans on inclusive language); and (d) how they shape party choice and democratic behaviour. Together, they combine panel designs, cross-sectional national samples, and cross-country comparative survey data, and deploy methodological strategies ranging from structural equation modelling to hybrid panel estimators. The core contribution of the panel is twofold: first, we demonstrate that gender attitude formation in Europe is not adequately captured by standard value change models, which assume linear liberalisation. Instead, our evidence suggests a gendered polarisation process: young women continue to liberalise, but young men do not necessarily follow — and in some contexts, move in the opposite direction. Second, we demonstrate that “gender” in public opinion cannot be reduced to latent ideology: specific policy objects have qualitatively distinct attitudinal structures, shaped by elite politicisation and partisan cueing.

Title	Details
Who’s Asking? Interviewer Gender and the Expression of Sexist Attitudes	View Paper Details
Attitude Change or Attitude Activation? Explaining the Gender Voting Gap through Anti-Gender Attitudes in Germany	View Paper Details
Developing measurements to disentangle the role of gender resentment and ressentiment in anti-feminist views	View Paper Details
Investigating Contextual Explanations for the Gender-Generation Gap in Europe: Young Men’s Declining Existential Security and Hostile Sexism	View Paper Details
In the mood for sexism? Cross country and over time variation in sexist attitudes	View Paper Details