Autocratic Genderwashing and Genderbashing as Authoritarian Regime-Survival Strategies

Modern autocrats are increasingly relating to gender politics in different ways. On the one hand, authoritarian leaders such as Erdogan and Putin have engaged in an “anti-gender” agenda by rolling back hard-fought gender equality achievements (e.g. Roggeband and Krizsán 2018). On the other hand, leaders of established autocracies compete over who is the more gender equal (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2022; Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2022), and take pride in demonstrating their country’s gender equality advances (Tripp 2019; Valdini 2019). In this paper, we argue that the seemingly contradictory positions on gender equality among authoritarian leaders can be reconciled. To make the argument, we present autocratic genderwashing and genderbashing as two different ways in which autocrats use gender equality strategically as a tool to legitimize their rule and secure regime survival. Autocratic genderwashing involves pushing through gender equality reforms to mitigate criticism about democratic deficiencies, while autocratic genderbashing denounces gender activism as being opposed to patriotism in order to legitimize the autocrat’s hold on power. To assess whether and how each of the two legitimation strategies actually works, and thus whether they make (groups of) citizens upgrade their beliefs about their country’s autocratic political system, we use a novel vignette-based survey experiment on 1,500 citizens in Uganda (data collection in March 2024). Uganda is a suitable case for analysis, as its autocratic government engages in both autocratic genderwashing (e.g. in the area of gender and political representation) and genderbashing (e.g. in the area LGBTQ+ laws).