Failure of democratic resilience in face of anti-gender-mobilisations, and socio-economic inequalities: A case Study From Slovakia

The presentation addresses the conference theme through an empirical case-study exploring the failure of democratic resilience vis-à-vis gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights in Slovakia. In doing so, it illuminates questions of when and how actors fail in their efforts to preserve democracy (question 5), proposing pathways to democratic resilience in the face of anti-gender mobilisations (question 3) and finally, advancing a broader conceptualisation of democratic resilience in the face of anti-gender forces (question 1). The study is based on a unique dataset of over 134,000 voter responses, gathered during the 26 days leading up to and including the day of the 2023 snap Slovak Parliamentary Elections. This rich dataset offers an in-depth picture of the electorate’s positions on 39 crucial political, economic, and societal issues, and a follow up post-evaluation survey with an experimental component conducted in June 2024 with almost 8000 responses. The data reveals a close connection between socio-economic preoccupations of the electorate and their attitudes towards gender. This key finding confirms a long-standing argument according to which anti-gender movements act as a site of political mobilisation in response to neo-liberalism, globalisation and ensuing socio-economic inequalities. However, the data also demonstrates that this connection is highly complex and in need of further investigation. A deeper understanding of this complexity furnishes valuable lessons about the failures and/or weaknesses of democratic resilience and indicates potentially more successful pathways. First, opposition to “gender” stands for all matter of new issues related to LGBTQ+ rights but not to equality between “men and women” per se. Second, even this opposition to gender as a symbol of broader range of issues, is not assigned high priority by most voters. If extremely liberal and extremely conservative parties prioritise cultural and identitarian issues, the majority of the electorate in the middle assign higher stakes to socio-economic issues. More conservative parties are skilful in presenting their anti-gender agendas as being linked to the socio-economic preoccupations. The more liberal parties on the other hand continue to ignore or downplay the socio-economic concerns of the majority of electorate. As a result, not only do their pro-gender campaigns fail, but the popularity of liberal values, EU politics and democracy suffer. This is the third key finding from the data. Namely, that there is a disjuncture between the operational and symbolic ideology of the electorate in relation to liberalism and liberal values. When faced with the term “liberalism”, respondents tend to position themselves as more conservative than when the term “liberalism” is absent. Based on the findings, we argue that one of the key factors for the failure of democratic resilience is insufficient attention to socio-economic concerns of the electorate. Stronger connection between gender and socio-economic issues in political programmes and strategies leads to more successful democratic resilience. Therefore, when conceptualising democratic resilience in face of anti-gender movements, scholars need, in conformity with materialist feminist approaches, to pay attention to a significantly broader range of issues than is usually the case in gender studies.