Representations of Democracy in Anti-Gender Politics

In this paper, we analyze how actors promoting anti-gender politics mobilize the language of democracy and rights as well as democratic institutions to contest and redefine democracy in exclusionary ways. We show how, in the realm of anti-gender politics, abuse of democratic language and institutions is a key instrument of autocratization. Our contribution is to show that anti-gender politics, in a true intersectional sense, constitutes a form of gendered democratic distortion, using democracy’s own language, democratic rights, and institutions to undermine its substance. Our analysis unfolds in three steps. First, we examine the meanings of democracy that anti-gender actors invoke and show that these are majoritarian, sovereigntist, and exclusionary in gendered ways. This is majoritarian and sovereigntist notion of democracy is incompatible with egalitarian or feminist conceptions of democracy (Squires, 2012; Walby, 2011). Second, we examine the meanings and hierarchies of democratic rights proposed by anti-gender actors. We identify five strategies used to mobilize rights language: capturing rights discourses through organizational branding; redefining the category of rights-bearing subjects; deploying victim-perpetrator reversals to legitimize rights restrictions; constructing hierarchies that elevate selective rights while subordinating others; and invoking sovereignty to frame international human rights norms as foreign impositions. Third, we look at how anti-gender actors use and, if needed, refashion democratic institutions to promote their objectives that are both gendered and intersectionally exclusive. We show that they rely extensively on democratic mechanisms - legal/constitutional, participatory and legislative instruments - to pursue gendered exclusionary objectives. We argue that even when anti-gender actors mobilize democratic discourses and institutions, they ultimately undermine rather than pursue democracy - if democracy is defined in substantive and gender-inclusive rather than purely procedural ways. They propose an exclusionary gendered – and raced – project of democracy, reconfigured meanings and hierarchies of rights, and reshaped democratic institutions, all of which serve to undermine core democratic values. These findings align with scholarship on third-wave autocratization, which show how anti-democratic actors use democratic language and institutions as façades for autocratic projects (Bermeo, 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019; Schedler, 2013). Such autocratization is incremental, legalistic, and couched in democratic rhetoric. Anti-gender politics should therefore be read as part of this broader pattern - using democracy's own language and institutions to erode its substance. This paper builds on comparative data from the European CCINDLE project spanning six EU member states (Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Sweden) and the EU level. Through multi-method analysis, CCINDLE identifies cross-cutting patterns and trends in anti-gender politics within these diverse contexts, patterns that warrant further testing through more systematic hypothesis-testing comparative analysis. Our analysis is exploratory, identifying emerging trends of a relatively new phenomenon rather than conducting a strict comparison of the seven contexts.