The Role of Women Candidates in Legitimising and Normalising Far-Right Parties

Do voters perceive women candidates of the far right as more democratic and socially acceptable than men candidates of the far right? If so, far-right parties may strategically use women candidates to appear as legitimate and 'normal' actors in the eyes of voters, thereby reducing the stigma they face. Building on the literature on gender stereotypes and candidates, we theorise that voters perceive women far-right candidates as more cooperative, empathetic, respectful of rules and moderate – and therefore, more socially acceptable and more likely to behave in line with democratic principles – than men far-right candidates. This should be the case even when candidates explicitly favour positions that strongly break with the principles of liberal and electoral democracy. To test this, we run an original online vignette survey experiment in Germany (N = 3,881), where the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is still relatively stigmatised compared to its counterparts in other European countries. We find that, overall, women AfD candidates are perceived as more socially acceptable than their men counterparts, but not as more democratic. However, when they engage in anti-immigration rhetoric, women candidates are perceived as more democratic. Our findings bring a novel gender perspective to the literature on far-right normalisation and legitimisation, showing that women are key actors in both these processes.