Right-Wing Populism, Religion and Gender: Dynamics and Implications

Right-wing populist parties have been part of the European political landscape for at least 30 years, but recently they have acquired an unprecedented degree of political power and popular support. Also in other parts of the world, such as Brazil and the United States, right-wing populism is on the rise, and with it a particular type of gendered and religiously-infused rhetoric that is specific to the 2010s but cuts across national and even regional contexts. This workshop – endorsed by the ECPR Standing Group on Religion and Politics and the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics – proposes to investigate the links between right-wing populism, gender and religion from a multidisciplinary and transnational perspective in order to unveil the causes and implications of these important new dynamics. In Europe, scholars have been writing extensively on the phenomenon of right-wing populism since at least the early 1990s (to name just a few among the fast-growing scholarship: Betz 1994; Bornschier 2010; Kriesi et al. 2006; Mouffe 2005; Mudde 2004, 2007, 2018; Wodak 2015). This body of research emphasizes the rise of this new party family that did not fit into previous party classifications and links it to the rise of a new cleavage: between winners and losers of globalization processes; and/or between the supporters and the opponents of the “silent”, post-material revolution happened in the left in the 1970s. These parties, with a few but notable exceptions, were mostly considered as a fringe phenomenon until the 2010s, and in very few cases – such as Austria and Italy – they had been able to be part of coalition governments and influence policies, at the local, national and European level. In the 2010s, however, this situation seems to have rapidly changed, with the dramatic rise of populist parties in the polls of many European countries, and the proliferation of new successful ones in countries where they had been mostly absent. While most of these parties still have not accessed government at the national level, it can be argued that they have achieved sufficient public attention to shape contemporary party competition and dynamics of policy change. In many cases, this new influence – on the domestic policies of many EU member states but in the future, possibly, on the EU policies themselves – has sparked harsh discussions and controversies, especially in relation to the right-wing populist parties’ attitude towards gender issues and religious issues. Many of these parties come from political traditions rooted in a traditional, if not outright patriarchal, view of gender roles and other gender-related issues, especially LGBT+ rights. Therefore, they often support policies allegedly oriented at defending the “traditional family” based on the union of a man and a woman, and articulate a vision of society in which women’s privileged spheres are the family and education, while they seem to regard the “public sphere” as a preserve of men. Moreover, they usually recognize as legitimate only heterosexual partnerships, and reject not only same-sex unions, but often even the recognition of some basic right to LGBT+ people. In some cases, they even denounce “gender conspiracies”, allegedly aiming at subverting traditional European society and values to create a deterritorialized and multicultural Europe and to mainstream homosexuality. Building on the emergent scholarship on gender, religion and populism, this workshop places the gender and religious dimensions of right-wing populism at the core of the investigation in a transversal fashion. Recent calls have been made to move beyond a rather eclectic variety in focuses on the gender dimension of populism based on a limited number of cases (Abi-Hassan 2017; Dingler et al. 2017; De Lange and Mügge 2015; Erzeel and Rashkova 2017). This workshop aims at taking the analysis of gender and religious dynamics in right-wing populism to the next level and to systematically assess how, to what extent, under what conditions and to what effect is right-wing populism gendered and sexualized? Until recently, the gender dimension of populism was mostly studied at the margin, if not largely ignored in scholarships on populism (Mudde 2007: 91). If at all studied, the gender dimension was mostly assessed on the demand-side and the so-called gender gap in electoral support for far-right parties in Western Europe (Betz 1994; Kitchelt and McGann 1995; Norris 2005). Recent scholarship has come to contradict or at least nuance the traditional understanding of the gender gap in electoral support. For instance, recent studies point out that the gap significantly varies across elections in Europe (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2002) and that the gap is altogether narrowing (Mayer 2013; Spierings and Zaslove 2017). Moreover, looking beyond Europe, studies show that no such gap in electoral support is to be found for a number of historical left-wing populist figures such as Peron or Chavez in Latin America (Kampwirth 2010). More importantly, the scholarship is now turning to examine more broadly the gender dynamics at the core of populist ideology and communication (Norocel 2010; Meret and Siim 2013; Pajnik and Sauer 2018). The call is made for moving beyond the simplistic assumption of right-wing populist parties as being “Männerparteien” (Rashkova and Zankina 2017) and to systematically assess the way(s) in which gender is embedded at the core of populist ideology (De Lange and Mügge 2015; Meret and Siim 2013; Abi-Hassan 2017; Mudde and Rovira Katwasser 2015). While preliminary results indicate the centrality of gender representations in right-wing populist rhetoric (Norocel 2010), attention is attracted towards the variations in the ways gender is integrated into populism ideology and communication across traditional forms of populism and contemporary ones, types of populist parties in Europe (Andreassen and Lettinga 2012; De Lange and Mügge 2015; Meret and Siim 2013; Mudde 2007), connections made between gender roles, gender equality and other core populist issues (Akkerman and Hagelund 2007; Rosenberger and Sauer 2012; Akkerman 2015; Scrinzi 2017), and between populism in Europe and populism in Latin America (Kampwirth 2010; Mudde and Rovira Katwasser 2015). Resistance by European right-wing populist parties to progressive change and the transformation of gender and sexual norms have been linked to their religious views , since they often ground their view of gender roles, LGBT+ rights, and the family to a conservative interpretation of the Christian message (Ozzano 2015). Indeed, they propose a strong, identity-driven, view of religion, which is usually not a matter of Church attendance, but of defence of the Christian identity of Europe against both external “intruders” (the immigrants) and internal enemies (the supporters of a multicultural and multireligious Europe) (Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy 2016). Religion is thus a fundamental tenet of a communitarian and civilizational worldview that opposes any kind of religious and sexual diversity, but is especially outspoken in relation to Islam, seen as “a dangerous ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with the values that inform Western civilization” (Betz 2017, 376). This can even lead the parties to clash with the official positions of religious actors – when they propose a tolerant and welcoming attitude towards Muslim immigrants – as we can see for example in the case of the complex relation between the Lega party and the Catholic Church in Italy (Ozzano and Giorgi 2016; Ozzano 2016). As a consequence of this worldview, their view of gender issues is related to religion even in the cases of parties which propose a someway more liberal and secular view of women’s role and LGBT rights, such as the Dutch and, recently, also the French case. In fact, right-wing populist parties in Europe often engage in a double-strategy of upholding traditional views of the family and pursuing anti-feminist and anti-homosexual policies, and at the same time claiming to be in support of women and homosexuals as a way of grounding their opposition to Islam, which is portrayed as uncompromisingly patriarchal, intolerant and violent, and therefore as allegedly incompatible with the secular and tolerant European values and worldview (Scrinzi 2017; Brubaker 2017; Spoerri 2013). This workshop is based on the idea that such dynamics are rebooting the relationship between populism, religion and gender. Moreover, this changed relationship, coupled with the unprecedented support enjoyed by right-wing populist parties today, is fundamentally changing the development of public debates on both gender-related and religion-related issues as they were conceived until the 2010s. Therefore, we think that a thorough and multidisciplinary analysis of the above-described phenomena is necessary to understand the changes happening throughout Europe as well as in other parts of the world. Particularly, the workshop welcomes contributions that aim at thoroughly assessing the complex relations between right-wing populism, religion and gender issues along the following lines of investigation: To what extent are the symbolic and substantive elements of right-wing populism gendered and sexualized? How does gender and religious norms shape right-wing populist discourse? What are the issues that are politicized? How are these issues coupled to core issues of right-wing populism? Can we identify recurrent patterns or similitudes in the way(s) right-wing populism is gendered and/or de-gendered across national and policy contexts? 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