Ideological polarization on gender roles in Europe.

Right-wing populist rethoric triggers attitudes and policies against gender equality. This gender backlash and polarization brings back older debates on gender roles. This paper analyses how attitudes on gender equality have been recently subject to deeper division and even moved towards more conservative views; more specifically, to what extent attitudes towards gender equality are being explained based on left-right orientations vs. cognitive mobilization in the last decades. The main research question is 1) to what extent a gender backlash can be observed across Europe, and 2) whether an increasing presence and relevance of radical right-wing parties in Europe is influencing a growing ideological divide on attitudes towards gender roles. For this purpose, we analyse with longitudinal data from WVS/EVS, attitudes towards gender roles across European countries and in different points in time to observe what factors explain different views on gender roles in Europe and how these visions are changing.