Attitudes towards the rights of homosexual individuals and support for the radical right: Is it worth criticizing them?

Research on the implications of attitudes towards the rights of homosexual individuals in the electorate of radical right populist parties (RRPP) has yielded various and even contradictory conclusions regarding support for these parties. This is because these rights are addressed in discourse and policies in very different ways depending on the RRPP and the country in question. Some authors argue that the nativist logic of these parties has led RRPPs to adopt post-feminist discourses (Jordan, 2016), defending the rights of women and homosexuals as part of the nation threatened by Islamic immigration (Akkerman, 2015; De Koster et al., 2014; Mayer, 2015; Dudink, 2017; Backlund & Jungar, 2019). The rights of homosexual individuals are thus defended to divide natives from Islamic immigrants, and gays consequently become an important part of nativist rhetoric (Fiers & Muis, 2021; Foster & Kirke, 2022; Jennings & Ralph-Morrow, 2020). On the contrary, other authors argue that the fight against homosexual rights is a crucial core within the anti-liberal agenda of RRPS (Doerr, 2021; Bastos & López, 2021; Donà, 2021; Colella, 2021; Korolczuk, 2020). This contradiction has also been noted on the demand side (see for example Finnsdottir, 2022; or Spierings & Glas, 2021). Based on a data analysis from 18 European countries in the last two waves of the European Social Survey (ESS 9 and 10) and data from the Chapel Expert Survey 2019, this research aims to provide explanations for this contradiction. The study concludes that anti-gay attitudes are explanatory of RRPP voting where countries exhibit greater polarization on gender and religious issues. In other words, antigay sentiments explain RRPP voting when there is a specific gender-religious opportunity structure (Reinhardt et al., 2023) in the country that is exploitable by the RRPP.