Theorising gender voting gaps through Gender Positional Deprivation.

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical framework to help us understand voting for Right-Wing Populist Parties (RWPP) in a gendered way, including an explanation for the gender gap and why women vote for this kind of party. Women's vote for RWPP is considered a puzzle due to these parties' antigender discourse (among others, Dietze & Roth, 2020a; Spierings, 2020) and the subsequent assumption of scholars that women voting for RWPP vote against their own female interests. Most existent theories explain much better why men vote for RWPP than they can explain female vote. We aligned with the policy review Past, Present and Future of Democracy (European Commission, 2019: 10), which pointed out that "it is above all the electoral success of mostly right-wing populism which challenges the liberal dimension of representative democracies", and see the increasing electoral success of RWPP as the "organisational manifestations of a significant discontent of citizens" in which socioeconomic polarisation progressively intertwines with issues of cultural identity (20). The role of RWPP in channelling dissatisfaction with democracy, however, may have both negative and positive effects. The publication asks for better research on key aspects, particularly identifying the structural causes underlying RWPP's increasing electoral success. But critically, this policy review (European Commission, 2019), as most of the current literature, fails to recognise gender as a particular dimension of partisan competition, polarisation or as an explanatory variable of voting behaviour, even though the notable gender gap in voting for RWPP is rightly pointed out. We affirm that voting for RWPP cannot be satisfactorily explained if the gender gap is not thoroughly accounted for.