Defending patriarchal arrangements: explaining men’s disproportionate support for populist radical right in Europe

Men are consistently more likely than women to vote for populist radical right (PRR) parties across Europe, yet standard explanations centred on socio-economic vulnerability and issue positions account for only a modest share of this gap. This article proposes a framework, grounded in feminist theories of patriarchy and political masculinities, distinguishing three domains of patriarchal normativity: public-sphere male authority, productive-sphere breadwinner arrangements, and private-sphere heteronormative family norms. Using survey data from 20 European democracies, results show that breadwinner and sexual-normative attitudes significantly predict PRR voting and, jointly, absorb the direct gender effect almost entirely. Interaction analyses further show that a preference for male political leadership drives men towards PRR parties significantly more than women, concentrated among men in status-vulnerable class positions, while the other two dimensions operate similarly across genders. These findings advance an intersectional, demand-side account of the radical right as a vehicle for threatened political masculinities.