Abstract

The radical-right gender gap, i.e., the fact that women vote for populist radical-right parties less than men, is a well-studied phenomenon across Western democracies. However, no conclusive answer has been reached as to why the radical-right gender gap exists. We ask whether the gender of the leader may affect the gap. We hypothesize that when populist radical-right parties are led by women, female voters may vote for these parties in greater numbers, thus reducing or eliminating the radical-right gender gap. We take a women-centered approach that considers women as full political agency and who may make electoral decisions for reasons that differ from men. Using binomial and multinomial logistic regressions, we reproduce and improve upon existing research by Nonna Mayer (2015) by applying it to the cases of populist radical-right parties in Norway and Denmark. We find no support for our hypotheses: the radical-right gender gap is neither reduced nor eliminated under female leadership of populist radical-right parties, and it is sometimes greater under female leadership than under male leadership.