Backlash by Men against the Socio-Economic and Political Promotion of Women in Europe

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript provides an empirical analysis of the gender gap in voting far right parties (frp from now onwards) across European countries in Europe. This is of course an important subject matter. Having said that, I am not convinced by the empirical analysis. Or at least, there is a kind of mismatch between the argument and the empirical analysis presented. Below, I review my impressions of the weaknesses of the manuscript. Ultimately, I think that the manuscript is still at an initial stage and needs significant revisions prior to publication.

Regarding the main argument, the implication of the different hypotheses presented in page 6 is the following: the size of the gender gap in voting for frp is greater in countries presenting higher aggregated levels of gender equality. However, one wonders about the mechanisms at work here: is it really a cultural backlash? It might also be that there is a kind of inflation point in the level of gender equality that societies reach. Or is it the result of a process of ideologization of gender equality by frp’s elites?

Figure 1 is not commented/explained in the main text.

Regarding the research design strategy, I do not find it convincing for the following reasons.

First, the outcome variable. Its codification and its implication need to be better explained/discussed. It takes the most extreme values so that maximizes the size of the gender gap across countries. Also, why social desirability does not affect this variable?

Second, the selection of the key independent variables at the country levels: how are they related to the main hypotheses? Are they the most favorable or unfavorable areas/topics to find a significant finding? How are they connected to the gender ideology discourse of the frp across Europe? In the paper all frp from all countries studied are considered as equally willing to maintain an anti-gender ideology discourse. However, I wonder if this is a realistic assumption. In my view, there is a relevant variation across all European frp that is evolving across time (for example, the discourses of leaders such as M. Le Pen or G. Meloni have significantly changed across time).

Finally, the variable used to measure social conservative attitudes, “a man`s job is to earn money, a woman's job is to look after the home and family” seems to me as equally susceptible of being affected by social desirability as it is declaring to have voted (or the intention to vote) for a frp.

Regarding the empirical analyses presented in Table 2 and Figure 2, I have some concerns: first, the number of observations is very small and the text says nothing about the strategy followed to deal with missing cases (from 90,917 for the variable age to 6,268 for the outcome variable-as Table A3 suggests). Second, and as a consequence, it seems to me that the estimation is too demanding: a multilevel logit equation with so few observations and variables measured at both the individual and the country level. This is especially the case for the test of H3 (which in fact is not reported in Table 2 in the main text). My understanding is that the charts included in Figure 2 are the result of the specification of an interaction term of each independent variable at the country level and the variable “a man's job is to earn money, a woman's job is to look after the home and family” measured at the individual level. However, this interaction is not reported. And my impression is that there is not enough empirical variation to efficiently test H3 with this data. In fact, Figure 2 suggests a lack of precision in the estimations provided with very large confidence interval around each estimation point.

Finally, I think the language of causality that is used through the manuscript should be toned down since with the research design of the study we see no more than association between the variables.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper asks to what extent the gender gap in far-right orientation support can be explained by the socio-economic and political promotion of women. This is interesting and relevant research question and one that has – to the best of my knowledge – not been answered before. The answer the research question, the author relies on an interesting set and combination of data. I do, however, have some questions and there are a few things that the author should address in greater detail. I note them (mostly) in the order of the paper. 

(1)   H3 is very general and not clearly formulated. (a) You do not make a distinction between the socio-economic vs political promotion, whereas on p.10 (in your results-section) you seem to suggest different expectations. It would be good to be more specific. (b) It would also be good to specify how you expect conservative gender attitudes to moderate the effect of the promotion of women on the far-right orientation by men. (c) Do you expect a moderation effect on the gender gap in far-right orientation? You say “on the far-right orientation by men”? But in the empirical section, you seem to focus on the gap as the dependent variable? (d) The description of the way that you operationalized the conservative gender attitudes should be introduced in the empirical/data section (not the theoretical section). (e) The hypothesis needs greater theoretical justification and support. 

        (2)   Your study includes both Western and Eastern European countries, but you do not seem to include a control variable for that (or to investigate whether different patterns occur in both countries). I think that it is important to investigate this in a study on gender and the far right.  

       (3)   The EVS data are from 2008 and 2017. I completely understand why you use both surveys, but there are 9 years between them, and you don’t seem to control for survey year (or to investigate whether patterns may differ between the years). I would encourage you to do that. 

       (4)   One of the arguments to rely on the variable measuring left/right orientation (rather than populist radical right voting) is that the author expects the social desirability bias to be weaker (p.7). Has this been tested? Such statement would need a reference supporting the claim. I would also have liked to see a greater discussion on how far-right orientation and populist radical right voting are linked in the author’s dataset. 

       (5)   You use the size of the party in the respective country as a measure of the parties’ extremist image? Or both indeed strongly related? Again, I think that this claim needs greater justification. 

       (6)   The dependent variable In Table 2 is a dichotomous variable: (1) men with score 9 or 10 on L/R scale vs (0) women with score 9 or 10 on L/R scale. I’m not completely convinced about this approach. You seem to loose a lot of interesting information. It is also not a common approach in studies on gender and political attitudes or behaviour. I would definitely encourage the author to think about possible alternatives (even if it is only to argue in the end that the chosen option is indeed the best one). 

       (7)   The models rely on a different combination of data and countries. This makes them not directly comparable. At least as a robustness check I would run all the analyses on the same countries.

       (8)   The moderation analyses are not clear to me (see also point 1(c) above). Am I understanding it correctly that this analysis is only run for men? If so, this should be clarified and justified in greater detail, and I would be interested in knowing which pattern occurs for women. The X-axis and right Y-axis in all figures in Figure 2 also have the same title/measure? 

        Minor issues:

         -       A gender gap in populist radical right voting has indeed been found in the support for populist radical right parties, but research has also revealed significant cross-national differences (e.g. Immerzeel et al.2015; Weeks et al. 2022). This should be recognized. 

       -       The text needs another round of proofreading. There are quite a few typos.   

         Hope this feedback will be helpful. Good luck with the paper. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the work that you put in revising your paper. The paper has improved, but in my opinion, it still needs more work. 

- Some sections are not clearly argued/justified, or should be written more clearly. The paper could also use another round of editing. The list below is not exhaustive, but introduces several places where the wording can be improved or arguments can/should be made clearer: 

p.2 (line 46-53, line 64-67). In particular the first section (line 46-53) tends to jump from one idea to the next. It would be good to present your arguments in a more coherent way. 

p.3 - you mention "the second problem" - it would be good to also clearly say what the first problem is (it's there - but if you list problems, including a number for all issues increases readability in my opinion). 

p.4 - (lines 133-150) The approach used by Allen and Goodman seems to be introduced as a “solution” for the second problem, but it is unclear to me how that approach address the issue of macro/meso vs micro level. More general, I think that it would be good to discuss the second problem in greater detail. E.g. what is wrong with measuring socialisation at the micro level? What could be solution? 

p.6 (272-276): check wording of both sentences and flow between the two sentences.

p.6 (line 272) check wording of sentence. 

p.17 Line 782: if you suggest to use “different methods” in future research, it would be good to at least give some suggestions about what methods would be good or interesting. 

Sentence line 790-794. Check wording. There is a full stop in the middle of the sentence and “ is missing. 

Line 796-798. Check wording.

- The direction of the moderation is still not specified (stronger or weaker effect among women compared with men) in H3.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for further reviewing the paper. I'm happy with the changes that you have made. Congratulations with the paper. It makes an interesting contribution to our understanding of gender and populist radical right support/attitudes.