Gendered protest in Europe: EU norm diffusion, conservative backlash, and attitudinal hybridization

Abstract The paper examines how EU gender equality norm diffusion, conservative counter-mobilization, and multidimensional gender role attitudes influence gendered protest participation across Europe and neighboring states. It advances two hypotheses. The Backlash Amplification Hypothesis expects that EU-driven equality norms correspond to narrower gender gaps where conservative mobilization is weak and to wider gaps where it is strong. The Hybridization Hypothesis posits that hybrid attitudinal profiles, combining egalitarian and traditional orientations, gain political relevance in contexts of intense conservative counter-mobilization and high EU norms diffusion. The harmonized data includes the last three waves of the European Values Study and Varieties of Democracy indicators. Latent class analysis is used to model gender-role attitudes and multinomial logistic regressions with cross-level interactions to estimate protest participation. The results provide partial support for both hypotheses. They indicate that gender gaps in protest participation narrow under weak conservative counter-mobilization but widen when conservative movements are strong. Hybrid attitudinal profiles are relevant mainly for low- and mixed-effort protest, where their responsiveness to conservative counter-mobilization becomes visible. The paper contributes to comparative debates on Europeanization and conservative backlash by demonstrating how relations between transnational norms, domestic conservative counter-mobilization, and multidimensional gender-role attitudes influence the gender gaps in protest participation.