In recent years, the study of political distrust has attracted significant attention in political science, establishing itself as a thematic field with high-level theoretical and empirical contributions. Thus, the increase in citizens' distrust towards the institutional system and political actors in contemporary democracies has been extensively studied. This process is closely related to the growing globally political polarisation within the European context. At the same time, a variety of different perspectives and movements have been identified for some time now, with the common denominator of showing an explicit rejection of so-called gender equality and mainstream feminism. This phenomenon, conceptualised as ‘gender backlash’, has been particularly channelled by radical right-wing parties.

This research aims to examine the interconnections between political distrust and attitudinal orientations related to citizens’ gender backlash and their impact on political preferences. We hypothesize that anti-gender attitudes are associated with political distrust. This political distrust is perhaps caused by relative deprivation which conservative individuals (men and women) experience, given the last decades of progress on gender rights. We further hypothesize that this interaction between political distrust and anti-gender attitudes has different effects on support for different party families.
We rely on data from an original survey developed by the UNTWIST project (Policy recommendations to regain ‘losers of feminism’ as mainstream voters. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101060836 ) in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, and the UK).