Sexism and the Far-Right Vote: The Individual Dynamics of Gender Backlash

New article by Eva Anduiza and Guillem Rico in American Journal of Political Science.

This article contends that sexism plays a fundamental role in the electoral rise of the far right, both as a predis-position and as a changing attitude. Using panel data from Spain, we show that modern sexism is indeed among the mostimportant attitudinal predictors of voting for the far-right party Vox. The results also show that internal individual changesin levels of modern sexism impact far-right voting. Backlash attitudinal change, defined as increases in sexism occurring ina context of feminist momentum, contributed significantly to the recent emergence of the radical right. Our findings indi-cate that sexism is not a crystalized attitude but rather susceptible to showing short-term changes with important politicalconsequences. This highlights the importance of understudied context-dependent individual dynamics of gender backlashin far-right voting.