Across many Western democracies, recent evidence suggests that support for far-right parties is growing among young men. While previous research has emphasised that far-right support is concentrated among men from middle-aged and older cohorts, it remains unclear why this pattern is now emerging among younger men.
Established economic explanations focus on economic insecurity and downward mobility as gendered processes. On the one hand, men and women occupy different segments of the labour market and experience deindustrialisation and technological change in distinct ways. In many advanced democracies, young men, especially with lower levels of education, face stagnating wages, unemployment risk and the threat of downward mobility more than women. On the other hand, changing gender norms have questioned traditional pathways to male status, leaving many young men socialised in the male-breadwinner model uncertain about their social roles as providers, partners, and fathers.
Although focusing on different drivers of far-right support, economic and cultural accounts are not mutually exclusive: economic insecurity likely interacts with pre-existing cultural factors to shape political attitudes and behaviours. However, we know little about the role of gender norms in this interaction.
We address this gap by proposing a framework that integrates norms of masculinity, economic insecurity, and far-right support. We argue that expectations of upward mobility among young conservative men are strongly tied to their internalised gender role. When exposure to economic insecurity undermines these expectations, conservative young men perceive a threat to their masculine identity. In response, they reaffirm traditional gender norms, which makes them more likely to support far-right parties promising to restore gender hierarchy.
This argument implies that (1) prior adherence to traditional masculinity norms moderates the effect of economic insecurity on male cultural backlash, and that (2) structurally gendered exposure to economic insecurity is not a necessary condition for this mechanism.
We aim to test this argument using observational causal evidence and a survey experiment in three European countries. Our findings will advance our understanding of the drivers of youth support for the far right and inform strategies to safeguard democratic stability in the future.
