How Institutional Distrust Helps the Acceptance of Anti-Gender Messages

Like many other post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Croatia experienced a flawed transition to democratic and capitalist order. The political and economic failures of this transition were accompanied by rising levels of institutional distrust. For example, between 1999 and 2020, the Croatian citizens lost trust at institutions at all levels, from the government and the parliament, through police and military, to Church, media and NGOs – though police and military fared much better than many other institutions (especially political institutions which lost the most trust), and Church and NGOs fluctuated in levels of trust quite a bit across the years (Bovan & Baketa, 2022). In this paper, I argue that this widespread climate of institutional distrust should be considered as an important factor in the successes of anti-gender mobilizations in Croatia, as the anti-gender actors exploited and compounded the climate of distrust in campaigning against sexuality education, LGBT+ rights and abortion. I examine this argument by looking specifically at the indirect 'effects' of anti-gender campaigning through analyzing the way 'ordinary people' interpret gender and sexuality messages encountered in the public space, and focusing specifically on the elements of (dis)trust that can be found in their considerations of the issues of sexuality education, LGBT+ rights and abortion. For this purpose, I use data from two rounds of focus groups (12 total) with 32 parents of school-aged children in Croatia and from six focus groups with younger (under 30) and older (above 60) Croatian citizens (and selected follow-up interviews). I use this analysis to reflect on the self-perpetuating nature of social distrust and consider whether the often more noticeable successes of anti-gender mobilizations in Central and Eastern Europe are better considered in the light of post-socialist institutional failures than, as it is often the case, the false construct of East-West value divide.