From Cradles to Care Homes: How Gender and Caregiving Affect Populist Attitudes

While most research agrees that gender plays an important role in populism, they also reveal a complex relationship. Studies consistently show that men are more prone than women to support populist radical right parties, though this gender gap is often overemphasised (Spierings & Zaslove, 2015). This paper considers populist attitudes as they can constitute an independent explanation of the gender gap through socialisation and by exploring a new causal mechanism: the role of caregiving. Therefore, this paper aims to clarify this gap by including an explanatory factor that has not been considered, bringing two caring-related life transitions (childbearing and eldercare). Life transitions are not entirely alien to populist studies, although most research has only included the economic verge of this phenomenon (Davou & Demertzis, 2014; Kriesi & Pappas, 2015; Zagórski et al., 2021) and usually without adopting a dynamic or longitudinal perspective. Childbearing can significantly influence an individual’s life and represents a crucial step in the life cycle and that affects differently to genders by demobilising women more than men (Bhatti et al. 2018) but not reducing their willingness to engage in politics (Jennings 1983; Schlozman, Burns & Verba 1994). We posit that childbearing introduces new responsibilities associated with adulthood, which in turn may prompt concerns and heightened awareness of previously unfamiliar aspects of the political system, such as social policies, childcare, and education. Conversely, the event of becoming a caregiver of a family member can lead to significant emotional, physical, and financial strain that limits their social participation (Hirst 2004), here we expect also implications in populist attitudes as this transition can produce a lack of socialisation and hence, new worries about the different options of eldercare such as care homes or domestic help. Concerning gender, we expect that it plays a role differently in men and women in both transitions as caring is usually associated with women and supported by gender roles and norms. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework by joining this caring-related life transitions and how they affect populist attitudes including gender. For this purpose, the paper draws on panel data collected in Spain between 2019 and 2024. Fixed-effect models reveal that having a child affects men by decreasing their populist attitudes and the relationship between eldercare and populism is not affected by gender although it decreases populist attitudes.