The Right Men: How Masculinity Explains the Radical Right Gender Gap
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Author | Elizabeth Ralph-Morrow |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720936049 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720936049
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(1) 26 –44
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720936049
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The Right Men: How
Masculinity Explains the
Radical Right Gender Gap
Elizabeth Ralph-Morrow
Abstract
The radical right is disproportionately supported by men, yet there is little research on
masculinity’s role in creating this discrepancy. This article breaks new ground in using masculinity
as an analytical construct to explain the gender gap in one of the UK’s most significant radical right
organisations: the English Defence League. Drawing on original qualitative data and interviews with
past and present English Defence League activists, this article argues that English Defence League
beliefs and practices were distinctly masculine. In promoting an ideology that subordinated Muslim
men and women, and in providing a forum for displaying and enacting manhood, the English
Defence League facilitated the supply of masculinity and therefore attracted far more men than
women. The approach used in this article shows how theoretical analyses of masculinity can be
incorporated within political science and offers a powerful new lens through which to understand
radical right parties and movements.
Keywords
radical right, gender, masculinity
Accepted: 15 May 2020
Introduction
Radical right voters, activists and party members are overwhelmingly male. Although this
overrepresentation of men is one of the radical right’s most salient features, there is a
dearth of research on the role that masculinity plays in shaping the ideology and appeal of
these political organisations. This is an important omission: gender can shape political
attitudes and behaviours, and the failure of political scientists to interrogate the role of
men as men within the radical right means that masculinity within these organisations
remains invisible (see Kimmel, 1993). Although sex – usually in the form of the biologi-
cally determined male/female – is a common variable in political science, the discipline
is reluctant to engage with gender as an analytical category. Men and masculinity remain
particularly undertheorised within political science, with this lacuna contributing to the
Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Ralph-Morrow, King’s College London, Bush House North East Wing, 30 Aldwych, London WC2B
4BG, UK.
Email: elizabeth.ralph-morrow@kcl.ac.uk
936049PSX0010.1177/0032321720936049Political StudiesRalph-Morrow
research-article2020
Article
Ralph-Morrow 27
‘de-gendering’ of men and an implicit assumption that only women have a gendered iden-
tity (Carver, 2014; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll, 2006).
Many studies have documented the radical right gender gap, yet very few have sought
to analyse it through the lens of masculinity. Instead, scholars often seek to understand
the gender gap by identifying reasons for women’s aversion to the radical right. While
these explanations might tell us why women are reluctant to embrace the radical right,
they tell us little about why men are its most ardent supporters. Other approaches, which
posit that the gender gap exists because men are more likely than women to have lost out
to globalisation and modernisation, reduce radical right support to a passive consequence
of economic change and fail to contemplate that employment and unemployment are
gendered experiences.
This article breaks new ground in using masculinity as a conceptual tool to explain
the radical right gender gap and does so via a case study of the English Defence League
(EDL), an anti-Muslim protest organisation founded in the United Kingdom in 2009. I
depart from previous studies by hypothesising that men are overrepresented within this
radical right organisation because its ideology and practices are masculine. In doing so,
I make two key contributions: I develop masculinity as an analytical construct that can
be used to explain radical right political participation, and I illuminate the role that
masculinity played in the ideology and appeal of the EDL. I contend that at its core,
masculinity is about the dominance of men over women, and the dominance of some
men over other men. I draw on original ethnographic data and interviews with present
and former EDL members – including founder and original leader Tommy Robinson –
to reveal that the EDL facilitated the supply of masculinity to its supporters by promot-
ing an ideology that subordinates women and other men, and by turning demonstrations
into a masculine arena in which participants could display physical strength and engage
in sex-segregated violence.
This article is structured by, first, reviewing the literature on the radical right gender
gap and setting out my hypothesis; second, using the gender studies literature to define
the key terms of males, men and masculinity and relating this literature back to my
hypothesis; third, outlining my case study and methods; fourth, explaining how EDL
ideology subordinated women and Muslims while bolstering the status of its men; fifth,
identifying how EDL practices allowed members to display and enact masculinity; sixth,
contending that women and LGBT EDL supporters were assigned a relegated status
within the organisation; and seventh, concluding and identifying areas for further research.
Theory
Gender and the Radical Right
Since the 1980s, researchers have found that more men than women generally sup-
port the radical right, with the gender gap documented throughout Europe (Spierings
and Zaslove, 2017). Mudde’s (2007) study of populist radical right parties ascer-
tained that around 70% of party members were male; Goodwin’s (2011) qualitative
research on the British National Party found that men dominated every aspect of the
organisation; and at least 69% of participants in Klandermans and Mayer’s (2006)
study of European far-right activists were male. It is important to acknowledge that
there are some limited exceptions to the gender gap; Mayer (2015) notes that the
National Front attracted almost equal numbers of male and female voters in the 2012
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