In mature Western European democracies, the Radical Right is the most recent party family to have emerged, and its members have become influential political actors in most of these states.Footnote 1 By now, we know quite a bit about the voters of these parties. We know that they support more restrictive policies on immigration and integration than other voters, but that their preferences are more heterogeneous in other policy areas.Footnote 2 We also know that they tend to have lower education, on average, than the voters of other parties.Footnote 3 Furthermore, there tends to be a substantial gender gap in their electorates: on average, more men than women vote for the Radical Right (Immerzeel 2015).Footnote 4 In fact, this is among the most consistent and universal findings in electoral research about these parties.Footnote 5
The anti-immigrant stance and the education gap are fairly well explained by the ‘losers of globalization’ hypothesis,Footnote 6 which holds that the groups most vulnerable to competition from immigrant labor will most strongly oppose immigration and ethnic diversification.Footnote 7 The gender gap, however, is not well explained by this hypothesis. In many countries, women are more supportive of restrictive immigration and integration policies, but they are still less likely to vote for the Radical Right.Footnote 8
The persistence of a gender gap in radical right voting, even in models that take into account the key policy preferences on immigration,Footnote 9 suggests that the conventional models are incomplete. In fact, the non-policy causes of RRP voting patterns remain poorly understood. We argue that to improve explanations, we need to study not only voter policy preferences or attitudes, but also voter motivations: the strength of their commitment to certain goals and aims.Footnote 10 We show that motivational gender differences regarding the aim of avoiding prejudice, rather than gender differences in immigration policy preferences, are key to explaining the Radical Right gender gap.
While the anti-immigrant message of RRPs resonates with many voters, many of these parties also raise normative concerns about discrimination and prejudice due to fascist or extremist legacies or contemporary rhetoric and symbols.Footnote 11 When parties continuously become trapped in conflicts about discrimination and prejudice, internalized motivations to avoid prejudice can prevent voters from voting for such parties, even if they agree with the policies they propose. If women are more likely to be motivated to control prejudice than men, then such differences can explain why women are less likely to vote for RRPs.
Our explanation of the RRP gender gap builds on and extends work by Blinder, Ford and Ivarsflaten,Footnote 12 which shows that people who are highly motivated to control prejudice are less likely to support extreme right parties and less likely to support restrictive immigration policies proposed by extreme right parties. We show for the first time using representative survey data from Europe that women are more likely to be motivated to control prejudice than men. Furthermore, we demonstrate that taking this gender difference in motivation into account explains the non-policy gender gap in the two countries in which the Radical Right has been the least able to defuse normative concerns – the British National Party (BNP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). However, gender differences in the motivation to control prejudice do not explain the gender gap where the Radical Right is widely considered to have successfully overcome such concerns by advocating a diverse policy portfolio, such as in the case of the Progress Party (FrP) currently in government in Norway.
Put differently, the electorate of ‘toxic’ parties that have become mired in conflict over past and present discrimination and prejudice is restricted to the subset of voters that is not motivated to control prejudice, and these are more likely to be male. From this we conclude that the motivation to control prejudice is an important part of the explanation of the persistent gender gap of RRPs.
THEORY AND HYPOTHESES
Gender differences in various types of political attitudes and behaviors are well documented.Footnote 13 Studies have investigated topics such as the general shift of women toward the left of the political spectrum in established democracies,Footnote 14 and gender differences in the saliency of issuesFootnote 15 and in turnout for elections.Footnote 16 Because the pool of eligible voters in established democracies is divided roughly equally between men and women, gender has been dubbed the ‘fault line of maximum political cleavage’.Footnote 17 Gender differences have been found in the electorates of individual parties (such as male over-representation in the Republican Party in the United States) or party families (the Radical Right as Männerparteien, the Greens as Frauenparteien).Footnote 18 Paradoxically, while gender is one of the default variables in almost all studies on public opinion and voting behavior, its inclusion and impact in electoral research is too seldom theoretically motivated.
Among virtually all European Radical Right electorates, women are under-represented, often constituting only one-third of the voters.Footnote 19 In fact, gender is the only socio-demographic variable that is consistently relevant in practically all European countries.Footnote 20 Among the proposed factors responsible for this gap are gender differences in religiosity, work sector, welfare dependency, aversion to violence and war, and support for nativist policies.Footnote 21 However, thus far no satisfactory explanation of the gender gap has been found. Existing studies have yielded contradictory or inconsistent results.Footnote 22 As Mudde has noted, the assumption in some studies that men are more likely to support the core ideology of the Radical Right – nativism or ethno-nationalism – has not been empirically documented.Footnote 23 In several studies, women were even found to be more strongly opposed to immigrants than men.Footnote 24 In a study of seventeen countries, Harteveld et al. show that, across the board, female voters are less likely to vote for an RRP even if they agree with the core ideology.Footnote 25 Our novel contribution to this debate is to argue that the gender gap in voting for RRPs that are mired in conflict about prejudice and discrimination is a ‘special’ one, because it is to a large extent caused by gender differences in motivations rather than ideological positions. Below, we first outline why normative motivations are crucial for understanding Radical Right voting in general. Subsequently, we discuss how this affects the gender gap in RRP voting.
Prejudice versus Social Norm
When it comes to group politics, citizens’ opinions and actions are shaped by opposing forces.Footnote 26 On the one hand, it is well established that many majority population citizens have negative biases against immigrants, ethnic minorities, Muslims or other ‘out-groups’.Footnote 27 On the other hand, present-day Western societies are characterized by a widespread social norm against prejudice, and many citizens sincerely wish to conform to this norm: they are internally motivated to control prejudice. Researchers have developed and validated individual-level measures of the extent of internalization of such motivation, and they show that this internal Motivation to Control Prejudice (MCP) is not distributed equally among citizens.Footnote 28
The psychological model of how motivations shape attitudes and behavior is based on dual-process logic.Footnote 29 The core of this logic is that attitudes consist of both automatic and controlled components. Automatic responses (or implicit attitudes) are generated without cognitive effort. Controlled responses (or explicit attitudes), by contrast, involve effort. This controlled process brings behavior into line with conscious normative commitments. While stereotypes are automatically activated in the presence of a member of an out-group, citizens who are motivated to control prejudice can bring this automated response in line with egalitarian beliefs.Footnote 30
However, people need to be aware that a norm is at stake before they take the cognitive effort to control prejudiceFootnote 31 and adjust their response in accordance with it. In the context of MCP, Blinder, Ford and Ivarsflaten show how the presence of cues suggesting racism or discrimination can ‘trigger’ MCP to override negative biases.Footnote 32 They show that respondents with a high MCP respond differently to arguments attributed to RRPs that trigger normative concerns than do respondents with a low MCP. Blinder, Ford and Ivarsflaten argue that the conflicts about racist and/or fascist heritage, symbols or arguments that surround RRPs make them what we term ‘toxic’.Footnote 33 Indeed, they show that the likelihood of voting for toxic RRPs is negatively related to MCP.
Gender and MCP
Although the number of population-representative samples that include measures of MCP is currently growing, its application in European countries (and in the context of migration and integration policies) is recent. The first major European validation study was published in 2010. Our knowledge about the distribution of MCP – both at the individual level (across socio-demographic categories) and at the systemic level (depending on party systems and media debates) – is therefore limited. In this study, we focus on gender differences in such motivations and their effect on the composition of Radical Right electorates.
To our knowledge, only one previous study employing MCP measures has reported a comparison between men and women. Ratcliff et al. found in their study of 760 students in Ohio that men’s average MCP score was significantly and substantially (over 20 per cent) lower than women’s.Footnote 34 Empirical evidence of a gender difference in MCP is thus supportive but scarce.
There are, however, theoretical reasons to expect women to be more motivated to control prejudice than men. Women have been argued to place a greater importance on interpersonal relationsFootnote 35 and generally score higher on empathy.Footnote 36 It is therefore reasonable to expect a stronger focus on interpersonal relations to be associated with a greater commitment to the goal of acting without prejudice toward others. Furthermore, women as a group in contemporary Europe have a self-interest in opposing traditional social hierarchies. Due to past and present experience of gender discrimination, women as a group may have become more strongly motivated to fight prejudice of all sorts. For example, studies have repeatedly pointed to consistent gender differences in Social Dominance Orientation.Footnote 37 These studies show that men are more likely than women to desire and support group-based hierarchies, in which particular groups dominate others. The anti-prejudice norm aims to control biases that are associated with (and supportive of) traditional group hierarchies, and it is therefore theoretically plausible that the commitment to control prejudice will be lower among those who stand to benefit from the traditional hierarchies.
If, indeed, MCP is generally lower among male than among female voters, this can potentially explain the gender gap in voting for toxic RRPs: women’s generally higher motivation to control prejudice will then offset the effect of policy attitudes. However, these theoretical conjectures should of course not be accepted without empirical investigation. We therefore propose to test the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: male-female differences in MCP, rather than policy attitudes about immigrants, explain the gender gap in voting for toxic RRPs.
Triggers
According to the dual-process logic, MCP can easily coexist with negative biases in the same individuals, and a signal that raises normative concern is therefore necessary for MCP to constrain thoughts and actions. In other words, a normative trigger needs to be present for behavioral differences to be evident between high-MCP and low-MCP individuals. Our argument, following that of Blinder, Ford and Ivarsflaten, is that toxic RRPs that have no shield against accusations of racism and extremism will trigger such normative concerns, while non-toxic RRPs that have a shield against such accusations will not trigger normative concerns.
Few of the parties considered part of the Radical Right family resort to blatantly racist arguments in their party programs. Parties usually need a ‘legitimate’ or ‘modern’ image in order to be potentially successful.Footnote 38 Ideological links to the historical extreme right have hindered the development of some of these parties.Footnote 39 Ivarsflaten shows that, in order to achieve electoral significance, parties rallying against immigrants need ‘a legacy that can be used to fend off accusations of racism and extremism’ or a ‘reputational shield’.Footnote 40 For example, she shows how a party with a clear reputational shield against charges of racism, the Swedish Liberal People’s Party, was able to successfully mobilize a large share of the Swedish electorate around the controversial policy proposal of a language test for immigrants in 2001 – long before (and to a much larger extent than) any of the contemporaneous extreme right parties managed to mobilize similar sentiments.Footnote 41
Consequently, we expect that motivational differences between men and women only explain the gender gap in voting for RRPs that lack such a reputational shield. Conversely, normative motivations will not result in a gender gap where RRPs have been more successful at shielding themselves from charges of racism. The electorate of toxic parties that trigger normative concerns is restricted to low-MCP voters, who are more often male than female. Shielded RRPs, by contrast, do attract high-MCP voters. Such parties may or may not have a gender gap in their electorate, depending on the rest of their ideological program, but MCP should not account for such gender gaps. An important implication of this argument is that RRPs that make a credible effort to distance themselves from extremism, racism, prejudice and discrimination can (depending on the rest of their policy portfolio) experience a feminization of their electorates, while parties that become trapped in these conflicts are likely to exhibit a stable gender gap.
Cases
In Table 1, we summarize our expectations of the extent to which the RRPs in our study are toxic and therefore can be expected to trigger the anti-prejudice norm. We study three cases that vary on the toxicity dimension: BNP (UK), SD (Sweden) and FrP (Norway). The BNP is an extreme right case without a reputational shield. The SD do not have a reputational shield either. The party has tried to substantially reform itself out of the extremist stigma, but it is still mired in controversy over prejudice and discrimination and had not been able to successfully defuse normative concerns at the time of data collection for the present study. The Norwegian FrP is a right-wing populist case with a reputational shield that has been frequently met with charges of inciting prejudice, but has become increasingly successful at defusing such concerns, to the extent that it has now been included in the governing coalition with the mainstream right Høyre. The case selection allows us to probe the hypothesis that MCP explains the gender gap only in RRPs that are trapped in conflicts over racism and discrimination.
Table 1 Cases
At the one end of the scale, the BNP is the most strongly associated with outright extremism and racism. The party continues to be ‘associated […] with an illegitimate tradition’.Footnote 42 While the BNP leadership has attempted to distance itself from the old extreme right, notably by stressing cultural and populist arguments over racism, the party’s ‘continuing dependence on right-wing extremists [associated to violence] consistently undermined the party’s strategy of “modernization”’.Footnote 43 We therefore expect a gender gap due to differences in MCP to be clearly present in the UK case.
The SD has roots in historic fascism as well, and party members wore uniforms as late as the 1990s.Footnote 44 In the 2000s, under new leadership (including current leader Jimmie Åkesson), the SD has gone through a substantial moderation process. It publicly rid itself of several former extremist elements, substituted a flower for the torch in its party logo, and managed to increase its voter base in local, national and EU elections. However, because reputations are sticky and the party has no main policy agenda other than exclusionist nationalism, it is still not able to provide a sufficient shield against normative concerns for large parts of the Swedish public. We therefore expect that MCP explains an important part of the gender gap in SD voting.
At the least toxic end of the scale, the FrP is a clear example of an RRP with a reputational shield. It was founded in the 1970s as an anti-tax party, and paid little attention to immigration during the first decade of its existence.Footnote 45 Its status as one of the biggest parties in the country – the second largest between 1997 and 2013 – signaled social acceptability, as did its inclusion in the government with the mainstream Conservative Party just a few weeks before the data we analyze were collected.
This reputational difference between the FrP and the other parties is backed by empirical evidence. In surveys that were part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, respondents were asked to score parties on a scale from 0 (extremely dislike) to 10 (extremely like). A large percentage of extreme dislikes (0’s) can been argued to signal social stigma, as it represents a very strong repulsion that is qualitatively different from assigning a low but not extreme score like 2 or 3. The data show that the SD is denounced to a much larger extent than the FrP: they are extremely disliked by almost two-thirds of the electorate (64 per cent), versus a quarter for the FrP (26 per cent).Footnote 46 In short, we expect that the FrP triggers few, if any, normative concerns, and that motivational differences therefore play a limited role in shaping FrP voting – let alone explaining a gender gap.
METHODOLOGY
To investigate the hypotheses posited above, we rely on data incorporating measures of MCP from three countries. For the United Kingdom, we use the British version of the 2009 CCAP project (B/CCAP), a multi-wave panel conducted in conjunction with national election campaigns.Footnote 47 For Sweden and Norway, we rely on data collected in the Citizen Panel surveys of both countries in 2013.Footnote 48 Given the multiplicity of data sources, no completely identical measures are available in all countries. However, the measures are sufficiently equivalent to allow for a comparison of the way they are related to gender and voting within each country.
Appendix A provides an overview of the attitudinal variables used in each country. To measure motivational differences, we relied on available indicators of (internal) MCP.Footnote 49 This measure scaled well in all cases, with Cronbach’s α ranging between 0.79 and 0.84 (see Appendix A for details). Preferences with regard to immigration and integration, the core policy agenda of the Radical Right, were measured using multiple questions about immigrants and their integration; these questions also scaled well (Cronbach’s α’s between 0.79 and 0.82). For reasons of space, we label this variable Restrictive Immigration Preferences.
The items used in these surveys were validated (based on similar scales) in earlier studies, which show that they are empirically unrelated to the Social Desirability Scale and the Self-Monitoring Scale.Footnote 50 This ensures that the measure does not merely pick up a general tendency to give socially desirable answers. Furthermore, as expected based on the dual-process theory presented above and empirical findings from previous studies, the motivational items correlate negatively with restrictive immigration preferences, but are still distinguishable from them. Appendix A presents the results of a confirmatory factor analysis, which shows that, in all three countries, the motivational and policy preference items load on different latent factors.Footnote 51
Gender was measured using a dummy for the sex of the respondent (0 for men, 1 for women). The dependent variable – voting for RRPs – was measured in slightly different ways in each country. Any analysis of vote choice for RRPs in the UK suffers from the low number of respondents that have voted for the BNP in a single survey. Therefore, in the UK, our dependent variable consists of a dummy indicating whether respondents indicated a vote preference (‘if there were elections today’) for the BNP in any of the five waves – collected over slightly more than one year – of B/CCAP. Still, this number is relatively limited (forty-six women and fifty-five men), which restricts the complexity of the models we can estimate for the UK. No such problems arose in the Norwegian case, due to the relatively large vote share of the FrP.
In the Swedish Citizen Panel, no vote preference question was asked of the respondents who received the battery of MCP questions. We therefore rely on a propensity to vote question instead: respondents were asked to indicate how likely they would be – on a scale from 0 to 10 – to ever vote for the SD. This measure is strongly correlated with party sympathy scores (thermometer scores), but previous research shows that the propensity to vote question is more closely linked to the actual vote.Footnote 52 The dependent variable thus differs between countries, preventing direct comparisons of the size of gender gaps in absolute terms. However, and more importantly, these measures do allow for a valid comparison of the mechanisms behind the gender gaps. See Appendix B for descriptive statistics of the main variables.
We rely on the following strategy to test our hypotheses. First, we estimate models in which voting for the Radical Right is regressed on the gender dummy. The coefficient of this dummy reflects the size of the gender gap. Subsequently, we add the traditional policy attitude variable Restrictive Immigration Preferences, and the new variable, Motivation to Control Prejudice, in turn. The motivational hypothesis will be supported if we observe a significant decline in the gender coefficient when we include the new motivational variable in the model.Footnote 53
Given that the dependent variables in the UK and Norway are binary, we use logistic regression in these two countries. Because comparing coefficients between logistic models is not reliable, we present coefficients based on the so-called y-standardization procedure, which do allow for such comparisons.Footnote 54 The regular coefficients are presented in Appendix B.
RESULTS
Descriptives
Before we can test whether gender differences in MCP shape the gap in RRP voting, we have to establish whether the men and women in our samples actually differ in their scores on these variables. For both the MCP and immigration policy preference measures, we divided the respondents into three groups with an equal number of participants: low, medium and high. Figure 1 shows the percentage of men and women that fall within each group for both measures. It confirms that men are not consistently more ‘tough on immigrants’ than women.Footnote 55 In Sweden and Norway, men do report a significantly – though not very substantively – stronger anti-immigrant sentiment than women, while in the UK no significant differences are found. The evidence suggests that, if anything, men in the UK are less opposed than women to immigrants. The gender gap in attitudes is thus not universally present or always substantial. Moreover, the graph reveals that, as expected, women score significantly higher than men on the MCP scales.Footnote 56 In all countries, this gap is substantially larger than any gaps in restrictive immigration preferences.
Fig. 1 Comparison of gender differences in motivation to control prejudice and restrictive immigration preferences in Sweden, the UK and Norway Note: distribution in percent. Asterisks next to the scale label indicate whether men and women differ significantly in their average score (p<0.001). Source: Sweden UK
To assess whether these gender differences in MCP are robust, we subsequently estimated models controlling for socio-demographic characteristics.Footnote 57 Table 2 shows the difference between men and women in MCP before and after controlling for these characteristics. To ensure comparability across scales and countries, the scores have been standardized. Again, we find gender differences in MCP, and they are sizeable – approaching half a standard deviation. Moreover, the second column shows that the gender differences are highly robust, as they are hardly affected by controlling for a range of other variables. The finding that women are consistently and – at least in the cases we have examined – universally more motivated to control prejudice than men is original knowledge. It contributes to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between different groups experiencing discrimination, such as women and minorities. Our findings suggest common interests and solidarity, rather than competition, between groups that experience discrimination.Footnote 58
Table 2 Difference between Male and Female average MCP (in standard deviations)
Explaining the Radical Right Gender Gap in Non-reputational Shield Cases
Above, we have established that men are significantly less motivated to control prejudice than women in all of the studied cases. Does this explain the gender gaps in voting for toxic RRPs – the BNP and SD – as suggested in the theoretical discussion above? Table 3 shows the result of regression models predicting a vote for the Extreme and Radical Right in the British and Swedish cases. The analyses presented here do not include any socio-demographic or attitudinal controls, because we are mainly interested in the nominal gap. However, Appendix C presents the models controlling for age, education and left-right position in all cases, and also income and work sector in the UK. These models with additional controls show an identical pattern.
Table 3 Regressions (UK and Sweden)
For UK: logistic regression. Dependent variable=voted for BNP in any of the waves. Coefficients on basis of y-standardization procedure (Winship and Mare Reference Winship and Mare1984). N=1,253; number of BNP voters=101.
For Sweden: OLS regression. Dependent variable=reported propensity to vote for SD (0–10 scale). N=1,381.
In Model I, we predict the vote by gender only. The positive coefficients of the gender dummies (female=0, male=1) in both countries indicate that, in line with earlier studies, men are more likely than women to vote for RRPs. In the UK, the gap is only significant at the 10 per cent level, which might reflect the low number of actual BNP voters (101).
In Model II, controlling for restrictive immigration preferences does not affect the gender gap in the UK. This is not surprising, given the earlier finding that British women and men score equally high on such policy preferences. In Sweden, where women were found to have somewhat less restrictive preferences than men, including this measure reduces the gap. Still, a sizeable and statistically significant gender gap remains. This is in line with earlier studies showing that conventional predictors of Radical Right voting – both attitudinal and socio-structural – do not consistently and fully explain the gender gap in SD and BNP voting.Footnote 59
Model III adds controls for respondents’ MCP. Taking this motivation into account has a much larger impact on the estimated gender gap than do immigration policy preferences. In fact, unlike any other studies we have seen of the RRP vote, the gender gap shrinks to insignificance in both cases studied when this variable alone is taken into account. This is in line with our hypothesis that motivational, rather than attitudinal, differences are responsible for the gender gap in voting for toxic RRPs. The models presented in Appendix C, which include demographic and ideological controls, replicate these findings.
Explaining the Radical Right Gender Gap in the Reputational Shield Case of the Norwegian FrP
If the normative signal theory is correct, then we should find that any gender difference in voting in the Norwegian case is not accounted for by gender differences in MCP. In other words, the gender gap in the Norwegian case – which earlier research has found to existFootnote 60 – ought to be a traditional one based on gender differences in ideology rather than MCP. This is precisely what we find in our analysis. A significant gender gap exists, part of which can be explained by restrictive immigration preferences. The third model shows that MCP has a general effect on the vote, suggesting that those most concerned with controlling prejudice are less likely to vote for this party. However, unlike in the two other cases, taking the motivational measure into account does not explain the gender gap, or even reduce it as much as the models that include the anti-immigrant attitudinal measure. Table 4 reports the regression results for Norway.
Table 4 Regression (Norway)
Note: logistic regression; dependent variable: voted for FrP; coefficients with y-standardization.
The gender gap in voting for the FrP likely reflects other aspects of its program. The party’s economically liberal ideology (reflecting its anti-tax origins) draws more support among men, who have in earlier studies been found to more often uphold anti-statist and neoliberal values. The party’s transportation policy, which emphasizes road building and opposition to toll stations, also probably contributes to this pattern. Neither the SD nor the BNP has such significant additional policy issues. Indeed, using data from the European Value Survey of 2010, Immerzeel, Coffé and van der Lippe show that controlling for attitudinal variables explains the gender gap in voting for the FrP in Norway, turning it insignificant.Footnote 61 This was not true for the other RRPs in their study, which led the authors to conclude that ‘[o]nly in Norway does the gender gap decrease by including the attitudinal items’.Footnote 62
CONCLUSIONS
The gender gap in voting for Extreme and Radical Right parties is one of the most consistent findings in studies of that party family. Paradoxically, women have been found to be less likely to vote for these parties even if they support their nativist agenda.Footnote 63 This suggests that conventional models of Radical Right voting are incomplete. In this study, we argued and showed that the RRP gender gap must be understood in light of the normative conflict surrounding these parties. While the anti-immigrant message of these parties resonates with many voters, the strong social norm against prejudice often prevents parties from fully mobilizing this electorate. Only parties that do not become trapped in conflicts over prejudice and discrimination can grow to substantial electoral significance.Footnote 64 The parties that are trapped become toxic, and their electoral potential is limited to the smaller group of voters that is weakly normatively motivated to control prejudice.Footnote 65 In this subset of voters, we find far fewer women than men.
This insight is relevant for explaining the RRP gender gap. We argued that there were good theoretical reasons to expect women to have internalized the social norm against prejudice. Our analysis in this article showed that this indeed is the case: in all three countries studied, men scored substantially and significantly lower on the MCP scales. Crucially, this difference is much more substantial and consistent than gender gaps in anti-immigrant attitudes reported in the present and other studies. We hypothesized that motivational differences would explain the low popularity among women of toxic RRPs, and this is what we found. The gender gap in voting for the BNP and the SD – parties we argued were toxic at the time of our study – disappears after controlling for men’s and women’s different scores on the motivation scale. The electorate of these parties is restricted to less normatively motivated voters – and these are more often male.
A different pattern was found in the case of the FrP, which can rely on its legacy as an anti-tax party and a more diverse policy portfolio and did therefore not trigger the anti-prejudice norm to a similar extent. Such parties can attract both voters who are highly motivated to control prejudice and those who are not. An important implication of this argument, which could not be tested in this article on the Norwegian case, is that RRPs that make a credible effort to distance themselves from extremism, racism, prejudice and discrimination can experience a feminization of their vote, while parties that become trapped in these conflicts are likely to exhibit a stable gender gap.
While the relationship between gender and immigration policy preferences differs between countries, and probably over time, gender differences in MCP appear more deeply anchored in contemporary (Western) societies. This calls for a wider research agenda to study persistent gender differences in voting patterns. Male-female gaps in policy preferences have been found, but are often small. Studies of gender gaps in political behavior can thus benefit from an approach that goes beyond policy preferences and considers differences in motivations.
This study also has another implication. While it is well established that RRPs’ image restricts the size of their potential electorate, our study further shows how. Association with (historic) fascism or violence does not deter all voters to the same extent. After all, negative bias against out-groups appears to be fairly broadly distributed, but is often kept in check by internalized norms to avoid acting based on prejudice. Such motivations, rather than ideology, thus constitute the natural boundary of the Radical Right’s potential – especially of the more toxic parties. Evidently, citizens’ levels of normative motivation are not only correlated with gender, but also with other socio-demographic factors. This can potentially explain other patterns of Radical Right voting. For instance, low Radical Right electoral potential among the more educated might originate in relatively high normative motivation among this group.
