Elite femonationalism and voters’ policy preferences: a multifactorial survey experiment

Political leaders increasingly promote seemingly opposed political values to attract new voters, mobilise against outgroups and push specific policies. A prominent example is when politicians combine support for progressive gender issues with an anti-immigrant stance, which could be described as engaging in a practice of ‘selective liberalism’. The party communication supply side of strategies of selective liberalism has received scholarly attention, and there is early evidence that suggests that such politics leads to preference adaptation (Lawall, forthcoming; Turnbull-Dugarte & López Ortega, 2023). However, audience reception is still not sufficiently understood. For one, we know little about how different social groups take up selective liberal signalling, especially with regard to social identities and their intersection. Further, the character of the attitudinal outcome is unclear: does selective liberalism lead to attitudinal changes along only one dimension (e.g., support for gender values or immigration respectively), or is the impact more complex, in that it changes voters’ perception of the issues that constitute a priority within the respective policy domain? This study therefore focuses on how citizens respond to selective liberalism in the area of femonationalism (Farris, 2017), and addresses the following two research questions: Do elite femonationalist communication strategies reshuffle the policies that citizens deem important around gender and immigration? Does this effect differ across social groups? To answer these questions, this study conducts a multifactorial survey experiment in which participants are exposed to a set of femonationalist vignettes, alternating the communicator’s party affiliation, gender and the framing of the femonationalist message. Beyond measuring classic gender and immigration attitudes, the post-treatment survey includes a novel battery of issue-specific items that assess citizen priorities on core issues within the relevant policy domain. These outcomes are analysed with regard to participants’ social group membership, capturing heterogeneous effects by gender and partisanship. Starting to address citizens’ responses to strategies of selective liberalism sheds light on how this key emerging practice can shape public opinion in contemporary democracies.