The populist radical right (PRR), it is often argued, are Männerparteien (Mudde 2007). Parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party, the Swiss People’s Party, the Lega Nord and other parties within this party family (Rydgren 2005) are overrepresented by male voters (in comparison with other parties), they have more male party members, and more often than not the parties are lead by men. To be sure, empirical reality seems to confirms this hypothesis. More men than women vote for the PRR (Givens 2005) and the majority of the party’s members in parliament are men. Finally, with the exception of Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the Danish People’s Party, and most recently Marine Len Pen the newly elected leader of the French National Front, all populist radical right parties are lead by men.
Remarkably, the emphasis on the populist radical right as male parties has not been questioned as such. Little research is conducted on how these parties frame questions of gender. Do they cater to specific formats of masculinity? Does the entire family of populist radical right parties frame gender issues in a similar manner? Moreover, existing research often overlooks the fact that women do vote for the populist radical right. As result, it is not clear whythose women who do vote for the PRR do so, and whether some populist radical right parties are more successful than others in obtaining votes from women.
In order to answer these research questions, this paper will combine qualitative and quantitative methods and a combination of supply-side (especially related to party framing) with demand side variables. This paper examines the most electorally successful populist radical right parties in Western Europe: the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Austrian Freedom Party, the French National Front, the Belgium Flemish Interest, the Swiss People’s Party, and the Italian Northern League.
