Normalising Inequality? Nationalism and Anti-Gender Politics in Europe’s Hybrid Public Sphere

In recent years, Europe has witnessed a notable overlap of discourses on gender equality and nationalism. Particularly, radical-right parties advance anti-gender nationalist agenda to delegitimise feminist movements as enemies of the nation, while positioning themselves as defenders of gender equality against immigrants who are supposedly incompatible with European values. Simultaneously, research has underscored the power of social media in shaping modern public spheres and challenging or reinforcing the mainstream narratives in traditional media. This study examines how traditional and social media interact, influence each other, and contribute to mainstreaming of anti-gender nationalist rhetoric, focusing on the public debates in the two media spheres in Spain, Germany, Italy and Poland over three years (2019 to 2021). Specifically, supervised machine learning models are trained on smaller scale human-coded data to analyse a large-N database of newspaper articles covering frames and positions expressed on gender equality value by different actors, such as politicians, political parties, civil society actors, citizens, and others. Parallel to this, the study applies natural language processing (NLP) and unsupervised machine learning techniques to explore the content generated by users on gender equality value on social media platform, Twitter, for the same time period. As a result, the study aims to shed light on how anti-gender and nationalist narratives are framed in both media arenas, how they evolve over time, and whether certain frames are mutually reinforcing across the two public spheres. Additionally, network analysis is employed to identify key actors spreading these frames on social media and examine whether they penetrate national traditional media. The findings reveal significant trends in newspaper coverage and social media discourse, highlighting the recurrent involvement of specific actors, utilisation of particular frames and emphasis on certain issues that collectively contribute to mainstreaming of anti-gender nationalism.