Anti-feminism and backlash politics

Societies across the globe have gradually adopted more progressive positions, particularly in the area of gender. Rapid feminist advances, however, can pave the way for the emergence of a backlash, i.e., the rise of attitudes against women’s advances in society. Nevertheless, extant research finds little evidence of backlash against sexual minorities (De abreu maia, Chiu, and Desposato 2023) and other historically marginalized groups (Bartels 2023). In this paper, we argue that anti-feminism, even when it is not widespread, can influence political behavior in multiple ways. To test our theoretical arguments concerning the nature and role of antifeminism in electoral politics, we focus on the Chilean case study since this country provides two advantages. First, Chileans at the beginning of the of the 1990s tended to hold socially conservative views, but public opinion here has markedly shifted towards progressive positions on gender. Second, gender issues took center stage in unprecedented ways during the last few years, particularly during Chile’s 2021 presidential debates. Based on a recent face-to-face, nationally representative survey of about 1,500 Chileans, we employ and validate an anti-feminism measurement originally created by Dashtgard (2022). This allows us to show that only 15% of Chileans hold anti-feminist attitudes, reinforcing previous scholarly arguments that backlash is limited to a small number of voters, specifically those with affinities with the far right (Off 2023; Rovira Kaltwasser, Salas-Lewin and Zanotti, forthcoming; Walter 2021). Statistical models show that, consistent with our arguments, anti-feminism is more prevalent among low-educated, male, right-wing voters with socially conservative values and authoritarian regime preferences. We moreover demonstrate that anti-feminist attitudes not only discourage participation in protests against inequality, but also have an impact on favorable and unfavorable views of Kast and Boric, and retrospective presidential vote choice for these leaders. In summary, this paper shows that although anti-feminism is not prevalent among Chileans, such attitudes help us to identify a specific segment of the electorate that far right leaders could mobilize against a feminist agenda