Gendering Democratic Erosion in the UK since 2016

As a long-standing liberal democracy, the UK provides an important case-study of democratic erosion (and of potential democratic resilience). After the 2016 Brexit referendum, increasingly chaotic Conservative governments exhibited classic characteristics of democratic erosion: executive overreach, the undermining of institutions like the judiciary, and the weaponization of culture wars together with xenophobic and anti-migrant discourses, accompanied by the growth of radical right populism both inside and outside the Conservative party. At the same time, anti-gender mobilizations flourished, with effective campaigns targeting trans rights in particular achieving some important successes. Although the Conservative’s electoral defeat in July 2024 brought a new social democratic Labour government promising a return to good governance, radical right-populism and anti-gender mobilizations have not gone away. The Conservative party’s new leader, Kemi Badenoch had long used populist rhetoric and espoused anti-gender views and Reform, a radical right party, gained its first four parliamentary seats in 2024 and increasingly advocates populist radical right policies e.g. around abortion and other anti-gender positions. Using an intersectional feminist approach, process tracing and qualitative data, this paper explores how democratic erosion in the UK since 2016 has been gendered, focusing particularly on the links between radical right populism, anti-gender mobilizations and the backlash against gender equality and LGBTQ+, and particularly, trans rights; but also assessing how much changed after the election of a Labour government. To understand and explain developments since 2016, the paper uses two case studies – gender equalities policies, focusing particularly on abortion rights; and LGBTQ+ rights, particularly trans rights and the contestation around the 2010 Equalities Act. The analysis assesses the extent to which the period between 2019-24 was one of democratic erosion and how far, since 2024, there is evidence of democratic resilience. The paper concludes that using a gender lens (and a wide definition of gender) to assess how far gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights are being eroded can provide an important litmus test to judge the extent of a polity’s democratic erosion and resilience, despite the gender-blindness of much of the political science literature on these themes to date.