Winning Over Women? The Effects of Security- and Rights-Based Femonationalist Appeals on Voter Support (FEMNAT)
P3-S76-3
Presented by: Jorge M Fernandes
Over the past 15 years, political parties in Western Europe have increasingly employed gendered rhetoric to advance anti-immigrant or anti-immigration policy stances. This femonationalist speech has been documented in print election campaigns, on social media, and in national parliaments (e.g., Reinhardt, Heft & Pavan 2023; Meguid et al. 2024; Gul 2024; Fernandes et al. 2024). While it has been argued that nativist parties, especially the populist radical right (PRR), employ femonationalism with the goal of maintaining or expanding their electoral support, scholars (e.g., Gul 2024; Lawall ND) have only begun to examine how effective the strategy is. To answer this important question, we employ a pre-registered survey experiment manipulating exposure to real-world femonationalist vignettes to identify the causal effect of femonationalist appeals on voter support. In particular, we examine how support varies by the gender and party of the speaker and respondent as well as by the content of femonationalist appeals – whether the appeal highlights the rights-based threat or the physical-security-based threat supposedly posed by immigrants and immigrant culture (Fernandes et al. 2024; Mainz 2024). The main contributions of our study are: 1) to determine the electoral implications of different types of femonationalist appeals, 2) to shed new light on which types of men and women voters respond positively to these messages, and 3) to understand the tradeoffs facing nativist parties in using femonationalism to attract women voters while not alienating existing men voters.
Keywords: femonationalism; gender; rights-based femonationalism; security-based femonationalism; vote choice; survey experiment