Gendered Democratic Resilience: Towards a Comparative Framework

The question of democratic resilience - of how democratic actors and institutions can counteract illiberal attempts against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights - has received relatively little attention in recent scholarship, which has tended to focus primarily on democratic backsliding. In order to bridge this gap, our paper proceeds in three stages. First, we bring together scholarship on democratic resilience (Lührmann 2021, Boese et al. 2021, Holloway and Manwaring 2022, Nord et al. 2025, Bianchi et al. 2025) and feminist scholarship on responses to democratic backsliding (Kantola and Lombardo 2024, Smrdelj and Kuhar 2025), neither of which are currently integrating each other’s perspectives and insights. Thus, we aim to integrate the concept of gender into theoretical frameworks of democratic resilience in ways that help us examine and conceptualize the conditions under which democratic actors’ resistance to autocratization is successful. We thus develop the concept of democratic resilience from a gendered perspective and specify the minimum necessary and sufficient conditions for its definition. We then undertake a plausibility probe with the goal of identifying whether there are any ‘real world’ cases that fit our definition, finding nine such cases in post-communist Europe. Secondly, we develop a typology of democratic resilience from the perspective of gender in ways that enable us to have a systematic understanding of feminist and LGBTQ+ actors’ pathways towards democratic resilience. We distinguish between three main (actor-driven, not mutually exclusive) types of resilience: societal, judicial and electoral resilience respectively. Thirdly, we flesh out this typology through case studies of successful episodes of gendered democratic resilience in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, we examine and classify nine episodes of democratic resilience in five post-communist countries during the period 2015-2024: the Slovak same-sex marriage referendum of 2015; the ‘black protests’ in Poland in 2016; the Romanian marriage referendum of 2018; Poland’s pro-equality mobilizations in the 2020s; Romania’s 2020 ‘gender identity’ bill; the 2021 decision of the Latvian Constitutional Court concerning the Istanbul Convention; the legalization of same-sex marriage in Slovenia in 2022; the 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland; and the 2024 decision of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court on the Istanbul Convention.