Closing the Gender Gap? How Party Strategies on Gender Issues Shape the Radical Right Gender Gap

A well-established body of research documents a persistent gender gap in support for radical right parties, with women being systematically less likely than men to vote for these parties across Western democracies. While existing explanations have primarily focused on demand-side factors—such as differences in values, economic positions, or issue preferences between men and women—recent scholarship has increasingly highlighted the strategic role of party supply. In particular, radical right parties have sought to broaden their electoral appeal by selectively moderating or reframing their positions on gender-related issues, often adopting more women-friendly stances embedded within nationalist or conservative frameworks. Yet, systematic evidence on whether such strategies actually reduce the radical right gender gap at the individual level remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by employing a vignette-based conjoint experiment designed to causally assess how radical right parties’ positions on gender issues affect women’s and men’s propensity to support these parties. Respondents are presented with multiple hypothetical party profiles that are all clearly anchored within the radical right family through a fixed baseline description. Against this common baseline, party profiles randomly vary along several dimensions central to contemporary debates on gender and the radical right. Specifically, the experiment manipulates party positions across five gender-related issue domains—women’s rights, gender-based violence, work–family balance, reproductive rights, and sexuality and gender identity—each framed either in a gender-friendly or traditionalist direction. In addition, the design varies the party label (radical right, national-conservative, right-wing conservative) and the source of the statements (male leader, female leader, or party manifesto), allowing us to disentangle the effects of policy positions from symbolic cues. For each profile, respondents report their likelihood of voting for the party. This design enables us to directly test whether gender-friendly positions adopted by radical right parties increase women’s support and, crucially, whether they do so more than men’s, thereby narrowing the gender gap. By isolating the causal effects of specific issue positions, the study sheds new light on the strategic trade-offs faced by radical right parties and clarifies the conditions under which supply-side adaptations can mitigate gender-based disparities in electoral support. More broadly, the findings contribute to debates on party competition and the evolving relationship between gender politics and radical right mobilization.