“Anti-Genderism” and Euroscepticism: A Cross-National Analysis

<p>The Anti-Gender Movement (AGM) has emerged as a potent illiberal movement in reaction to socially progressive issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, adoption by heteronormative families, abortion, euthenasia, and surrogacy. Despite increasing attention to this transnational radical right movement, little is known about the relationship that these views have with perceptions of the EU, which institutionally supports many of these liberal issues. Using two cross-national datasets, the Voices of Central Europe (VoCE) survey of ten Central and Eastern European countries and European Social Survey (ESS) with merged panel data from the CRONOS-2 follow-up survey covering nine countries in Europe, this study tests whether anti-gender beliefs are related to perceptions of the EU and compares them to similar Eurosceptic benchmarks from nativist and populist ideologies. The results from the multilevel models show in both cases that anti-gender beliefs are related with strong negative attitudes towards the EU. In the VoCE dataset, there are strongly associated preferences for anti-democratic forms of government and perceptions of significant threat from Western countries, as well as perceptions that the EU is threatening that it “dictates” laws to their country. The results from the ESS dataset demonstrate that anti-gender beliefs are strongly associated with a lower trust in the EU Parliament, a preference for decisions to be taken at the national level over the supranational level, and preferences to leave the EU, though, to a smaller extent than those with nativist or populist attitudes. The results testify to the AGM’s opposition to not only progressive cultural values, but also the EU’s liberal democratic “social contract.”</p>