Masculinity, Occupation and Support for the Radical Right in Europe

In recent years there has been an emergence of research linking post-industrial economic transformation and its impact on particular occupations - generally defined by their ‘low skill-level’ or the highly routinised character of their task content - to support for radical right parties in Europe. Accompanying this has been a growth in scholarship using gendered frameworks in analyses of these same parties, both in terms of its ‘supply-side’ in the content and objective of the party family, and with regard to the ‘demand-side’, in relation to the identity and attitudes of the electorate, giving distinctive conceptual weight to the ‘masculinity’ of the political phenomenon. The former strand of literature investigating the occupational origins of radical right support has at-best incorporated gender as a control variable in quantitative analysis, while the latter, that employs gender as a critical analytical category, has shied away from socio-economic inquiry. This paper brings these perspectives into conversation by examining how occupation relates to subjective perceptions of gender identity - drawing on seminal scholarship that has long articulated employment as a gendered experience - more specifically, the role of occupation as a central tenet to the construction and expression of the masculine gender identity. Drawing on European Social Survey data from twenty-one countries, I explore how subjective perceptions of masculinity among men interact with their occupation and support for the radical right. Using a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis, predicted probability modelling, and regression analyses, I show the role of 'masculinity' as having a modifying effect on support for radical right parties, with this effect varying significantly across occupational groups. This paper challenges the tendency to treat socio-economic and gendered explanations of radical right support as distinct, demonstrating instead their deep interconnection. Methodologically, this paper brings forward the relevance of Multiple Correspondence Analysis as an under-utilised approach in the social-sciences at-large, which has particular potential for gender-based research, complementing existing trends in the literature that have investigated gender and voting behaviour that cannot surpass descriptive inferences regarding the relationship between 'masculinity' and likelihood to support radical right parties, for example. Such approaches have been limited by the fact that, despite their findings, 'masculinity' is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to explain who supports these parties and why. Multiple Correspondence Analysis allows for a more a more fundamentally intersectional approach to these same research questions, by granting us insight into the nexus of interaction between gender identity and socio-economic structure. From here, we can bridge epistemological approaches, such as more interpretivist, inductive approaches and more rationalist behaviouralist approaches to voting behaviour. This paper begins with an inductive exploration that can later be empirically confirmed with empirical (regression) analysis. As such, we are enabled to appreciate the important role of gender in voting behaviour without situating it as singularly determinative.