Gender Diversity and Democratic Health: A Cross-country Comparative Study in Europe

Gender scholars across a variety of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences have struggled with the complexities of measuring and understanding gender for decades. Old controversies about whether woman/man categories emerge from biology (“sex”) or society (“gender”), have given way to more nuanced theoretical formulations that conceptualize the mutual role of both biology and society, and the nearly limitless variation this interaction produces. Thus, the idea of gender diversity is firmly rooted in academic research, but we know far too little about how gender diversity is expressed in different contexts and the consequences of variation – at the individual level, for societies at large – in how gender diversity unfolds. The aim of this paper is to develop the concept of gender diversity regimes and suggest how it can be used in cross-country comparative research. The basic idea of the paper is that countries can vary both at the micro- and macro-level. The micro-level focus refers to variation in the population and the idea that some countries, more than others, may have larger shares of the population adhering to non-traditional gender roles. The macro-level focus refers to variation in policies and legislation and the idea that some countries, more than others, may, in formal political documents, open up for non-traditional ways of expressing gender. Two types of research questions are of special interest in a cross-country comparison: The first set of research questions address whether the degree of gender diversity at the national level is associated with indicators of national democratic health such as levels of social and political trust, political participation but also indicators related to civil liberties i.e. press-freedom, freedom to organize, etcetera. Our hypothesis is that countries more open to gender diversity and non-conforming gender roles, are better off in terms of democratic quality than countries with a more traditional stance on these issues. The second set of questions relates to the individual level and zooms in on individuals that are exposed to cross-pressure, such as gender non-conforming individuals in a highly gender traditional society. Our hypothesis is that individuals under pressure tend to withdraw from public life and show lower levels of social and political trust and lower levels of political participation. At heart of the empirical analysis will be round 10 of the European Social Survey (covering 32 countries) which includes a new non-binary gender measure. Since these new non-binary gender measures build on scales, measuring degrees of adherence to male versus female characteristics, we will be able to conduct highly complex and nuanced analyses of “hyper-feminine” versus “hyper-masculine” individuals and all shades of gender diverse identities in between such endpoints.