Is CEE a creature of its own? Ladies at the ballot

Typically, we would identify some shades of ‘anti-globalisation’ and ’anti-establishment’ as attributable features of a populist voter. That is, we would expect a lower income, old-age White blue-collar worker to be in favour of the populist rhetoric. Interestingly, however, there is not enough disaggregation of these characteristics, particularity with regards certain regional specificities, which, as this paper argues, are invariantly shaping the socio-political context of the rising demand for populism. Such region-specific idiosyncrasies had started to be explored with regards radical right parties in the (Pytlas & Minkenberg, 2012; Minkenberg, 2017), yet it would seem not enough had been done on the gender-populism nexus of the region (Abi-Hassan, 2017). The hypothesis of this paper is as follows: women are more prone to populist government than their counterparts in the Western Europe. This assumption is based on the post-communist attributes described by (Stanley, 2017) and (Pop-Eleches, 2010). The argument is that the CEE’s publics are more conservative, prone to anti-elitism and increasingly sceptical to immigration relatively more to the mature democracies of the West. Conceivably, roots of these attributes may be also formed by historic ethno-national cabbages which remained subdued during the communist times (Sztompka, 2000). Importantly, we know surprisingly little on how women from an unprivileged background respond to populists, and even though we may assume a positive association, empirical examination remains scant. The research is of exploratory nature, using empirical data from all the waves of the ESS survey across the EU-countries. The identified links are to advance our understanding on the place women have within the bigger group of pro-populist voters.