Elite femonationalism and voters’ liberal trade-offs: a multifactorial survey experiment

Can elite communication influence citizens’ support for liberal democracy? Political leaders increasingly combine seemingly opposed political values in their communication, such as progressive gender views and conservative, nativist stances (‘femonationalism’). The selective integration of liberal and conservative perspectives is often understood as an instrumental choice to attract new voters, mobilize against out-groups or push illiberal agendas. While the supply side of this phenomenon has received increased scholarly attention over the past years, recent evidence suggests that selective liberal messages can increase the acceptance of anti-immigrant statements and raise support for LGBT+ policies among nativists. However, citizens’ reception is still not sufficiently understood. For one, it is unclear how different groups respond to the tension in liberal values presented in such messages, especially with regards to relevant group identities such as partisanship and gender. Further, it is unclear whether citizens are willing to trade off certain (il)liberal values and related preferences when confronted with their confliction, and the factors that determine such a response. Focusing on femonationalism as a prominent instance of selective liberalism, the present paper seeks to answer two questions: to what extent are citizens willing to trade off their preferences on gender and immigration in response to femonationalist statements? What role do factors such as the source and content of the statement, but also partisanship and gender identity of the recipient play in influencing citizens’ preference trade-offs? The present study conducts a multi-factorial survey experiment assessing the relationship between elite femonationalism and people’s policy preferences on gender and immigration. Participants in the treatment groups are exposed to one of eight vignettes that represent typical femonationalist statements, portraying immigrants either as a threat to gender equality as a national value, or as a threat to women’s security (message content). Two further attributes are varied within the vignettes, namely the partisanship of the message communicator (left-wing or right-wing), and the communicators’ gender (female or male). The outcomes include ranking items to assess value and preference trade-offs between the two issue domains gender and immigration. Further, absolute support for both gender and immigration policies is measured. This experiment design allows assessing whether the exposure to femonationalist statements as a form of selective liberalism impacts citizens' policy priorities and leads to trade-offs between conflicting preferences conditional on the message content, the gender and partisanship of the elite communicator and of the receiving participant. Further, it is assessed whether the strength of partisanship and the matching of the participants’ and the communicators’ group membership play a role in this relationship. This paper adds to existing work on selective liberalism by assessing the dynamics behind preference trade-offs in testing the causal link between femonationalism and concrete policy priorities. Second, the present study introduces a range of factors that can be assumed to play into this relationship, that have not yet been considered. More broadly, the study contributes to the emerging field of conditional support of citizens and the resilience of liberal democratic ideas in times where progressive ideas are instrumentalized to camouflage illiberal agendas.