The Rise of the Anti-Gender Coalition at the European Union: Actors, Beliefs, and Coordination Networks

Despite the increasingly organized mobilization of so-called “anti-gender” actors at the European Union (EU, henceforth), little is known about their efforts to reverse the progress made in the field of intimate citizenship – i.e., the set of policies regulating intimate partnerships, reproductive choices, and sexuality. Hitherto, EU feminist studies have mostly focused on gender-equitable reform and tended to examine one policy issue at a time, hence offering only a fragmented picture of the whole intimate citizenship policy domain. I draw on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF, henceforth) to investigate who the anti-gender actors at the supranational level are, which beliefs motivate them, as well as the extent to which they are connected and may collaborate. Until now, the ACF has been mostly employed by research on environmental and energy policies. This study contributes to broadening its generalizability by applying it to the intimate citizenship policy domain. I use mixed methods to carry out the empirical analysis. First, I identify the anti-gender actors active at the EU level by snowball sampling. These actors include organizations and religious representatives registered in the EU Transparency Register and political parties in the European Parliament. Second, I analyze documents retrieved from anti-gender actors’ websites to identify their belief system. Third, I employ Social Network Analysis to map out coordination patterns between anti-gender actors and define their roles within the coalition. The network includes both online and offline forms of coordination: hyperlinks to each other’s websites, joint events and campaigns, and the drafting of common position statements and reports. The preliminary findings show that, even though the EU is usually not considered a salient arena for the regulation of intimate citizenship issues due to the subsidiarity principle, the number of anti-gender actors operating at the supranational level has steadily grown in the last decade. Furthermore, the results indicate that the Catholic Church’s conceptualization of “gender” is the “glue” that keeps the coalition together, offering a unifying ground between actors with different policy priorities and instrumental preferences. Shared beliefs, however, are not always accompanied by coordinated activity and those who do not coordinate are only considered as “potential coalition partners”. The network analysis further allows identifying the role of those actors who do collaborate within the coalition: some remain at the periphery while others occupy a central position, sometimes acting as policy entrepreneurs. Lastly, some actors tend to cluster together according to the intimate citizenship issue on which they specialize, while others work on multiple issues at a time, thus serving as bridges between clusters.