HPS³ - Sigrid Roßteutscher - Social contexts and the gendered support for right-wing populism

This event takes place in English.

The Hamburg Political Science Seminar Series (HPS³) features international speakers presenting cutting-edge research in empirical political science and political economy.

We welcome on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 17:15-18:45 CET in VMP9 B130

Sigrid Roßteutscher (Goethe Universität Frankfurt a.M.) 

Title: Social contexts and the gendered support for right-wing populism – a panel analysis of young voters in Germany 

with Garritzmann, Susanne; Becker, Birgit; Jansen, Max P . 

Abstract: 

Radical right populist parties fare particularly well among lower educated men. This pattern is observable across democracies, and Germany is no exception to this pattern, as the results of recent elections illustrate. In Germany, the AfD has long received the highest vote shares among lower educated men between age 30 to 50. Recently, however, the AfD had huge gains among young males, while young females tend to (still) vote for left and green parties – which the results of the 2025 federal election drastically illustrate. Explanations of the gender x education gap in radical right populist support have largely focused on cultural backlash and economic grievances, which are argued to be a reaction to developments towards an increasingly diverse knowledge society. Focusing on young adults, among whom these arguments may apply less, we add a novel perspective on the education x gender gap in AfD support: We suggest that differences in social contexts between young men and young women with higher or lower education contribute to explaining the education x gender gap in AfD support. More concretely, due to differences in educational performance between boys and girls, they are likely to be tracked to different school types, which happens already after primary education in Germany. Since girls outperform boys in school already at an early age, more boys than girls tend to attend the lower tracks in secondary education (i.e., tracks that do not lead to university entrance qualification). Besides gender, parental background remains related to track attendance, with children of lower-educated parents being more likely to attend the lower tracks. Parental background, in turn, is strongly related to parents’ political attitudes and values, and thus to their offspring’s political socialization environment at home. In consequence, we expect that tracking is associated with segregated social contexts with regard to political attitudes and perspectives, i.e., that adolescents on lower tracks are more likely than those on the upper track to encounter a context that is favourable towards the AfD and corresponding political attitudes. These differences in social contexts, we argue, help to explain why young men who attend(ed) lower tracks are the most likely to support the AfD in the 2025 federal election. We empirically investigate our arguments with novel data collected shortly after the federal elections in 2025 among a large-N, register-based sample of 17- to 21-year-olds in Germany.

The HPS³ seminars take place in person at the UHH. Please find the preliminary program on the HPS³ Website.

We invite everyone interested to attend the HPS Seminar Series and are looking forward to seeing you.