UNTWIST project de departs from the policy review Past, Present and Future of Democracy (European Commission, 2019: 10), which pointed out that "it is above all the electoral success of mostly right-wing populism which challenges the liberal dimension of representative democracies". We try to answer the paper's demands for better research by identifying the structural causes underlying RWPP's increasing electoral success and giving the gender dimension a central stage. Notably, as most of the current literature, this policy review fails to recognize gender as a crucial dimension of partisan competition, polarization or as an explanatory variable of voting behaviour, despite the notable gender gap in voting for RWPP. We affirm that voting for RWPP cannot be satisfactorily explained if this gender gap is not thoroughly accounted for.
We agree with the European Commission (2019: 28-25) that the transformation of Western societies has made new structural conflicts salient, creating potential winners and losers. At the same time, mainstream parties' avoidance and disregarding strategies concerning these new structural conflicts have created the opportunity for challenging parties to attract voters (i.e. losers from those transformations) on the saliency of these recent structural conflicts as those who feel threatened by status loss and economic uncertainty are more likely to vote for these new challenging parties. However, in UNTWIST, we argue that the economic and cultural transformations of Western democracies have operated in a gendered way that has produced different classes of winners and losers between and among men and women who, therefore, share different rationales for voting RWPP.
We hypothesize, therefore, that initial demands for political offerings existed that were/are subsequently supplied by political entrepreneurs. We explore the role of RWPP as political entrepreneurs and try to understand how they have picked up these demands and framed them in their rhetoric of opposition to gender and sexual equality. UNTWIST further explores the existence of different rationales for men and women voting for RWPP parties.
For UNTWIST, it is critical to understand that human beings are highly heterogeneous. Citizens have different needs, demands, and worries related to their gender and sex, and these are diverse across social classes, ethnicities, ages, etc. All of them are legitimate and deserve to be addressed adequately by political representatives. However, in acting as niche parties, we hypothesize that RWPPs are twisting their responses to those needs in ways contrary to the EU's core values. Therefore, the final aim of the UNTWIST project is to find innovative ways to untwist the political answer RWPP are offering to align them with democratic and EU core values.
