Are Shifting Gender Relations Perceived as a Social Status Threat? Experimental Evidence on the Role of Gender for Status Politics

Recent research has increasingly acknowledged the important role of the resistance to shifting gender relations for the radical right backlash. However, few studies have attempted to single out and systematically assess how dynamics of women's increasing power affect attitudes and voting behavior among both men and women. On top of that, there is a lack of research causally testing these relations. This paper applies a survey experiment to address this gap and causally identify whether gender resentment plays an independent role in the radical right backlash. It does so by investigating whether the increasing political representation of women evokes a social status threat among men. Conversely, it assesses whether women express societal discontent about persisting inequality and how perspectives of future status gains affect their attitudes and political behavior. The priming experiment was fielded in an original online survey in Germany in January 2022. It manipulates how strong shifts towards more female representation in parliament appear to respondents. The results show that gendered political power relations and their trajectories influence respondents' social status and perceptions of political deprivation. For men, priming the topic of women in politics led to more negative evaluations of their future standing and political power. However, these negative evaluations did not translate into higher radical right voting propensities. This result highlights the importance of paying more attention to the political reactions of status winners, as the effects on voting propensities among women – in favor of Green parties – were stronger than among men.