Gendering the P in PRR. Explaining the Persistent Sex Gap in Voting Populist Radical Right

Even though several studies rightly point out that PRR parties in Western Europe are not a pathology when it comes to the sex of their voter base, at the same time many empirical studies show that PRR parties draw relatively more votes from men than women compared to almost all other parties, across countries. Two explanations are generally advanced to explain these voting patterns. First, scholars present socio-economic explanations: men are expected to be the ‘losers of modernity’ and to be more economic right wing. Second, scholars focus on men’s and women’s attitudes as they relate to nativism and authoritarianism: women are expected to be less radical. So far none of these studies has been able to fully explain the sex gap, and empirical evidence for women being less radical is actually quite weak. In other words, the policy-oriented part of PRR parties –the RR- is at best only a partial explanation of the sex gap. We need to focus more on the P in PRR. Some studies have included democratic satisfaction, discontent, anti-elitism, and anti-elitism, but theoretically these are very crude proxies for the Manichean concept of Populism. Moreover, a recent study applying a new set of more refined survey items has shown that these concepts are empirically different. In this paper, we use this refined measurement of populist attitudes for the Netherlands and the US to study whether women are less inclined to support PRR parties because they are on average less populist, not less radical right. This approach also dovetails with recent suggestions that the national discourse and style of parties has gendered effects; we translate it to the micro-level and directly test voting behaviour.