Anti-gender politics is a big topic in today’s academic literature. However, not all studies seem to agree on which actors are to be considered under this label. Some talk about political parties, others about civil society organisations, or individual activists and public opinion makers. As a reader, you can easily get lost amongst this array of characters. Therefore, this blog aims to map anti-gender actors in academic literature and wants to provide a new perspective for researching them. It documents the labels that are used and argues for studying them as interest organisations.
Who are the anti-gender actors in literature?
A literature study of 59 articles for the period 2008-2026 showed the use of different actor-labels in the literature. The identified actors were grouped into broader categories based on shared characteristics. For example: “scholars”, “sociologists”, “experts”, or “academics” were grouped together in “scholars and experts”. A similar grouping process was applied to the other labels and actors found in the literature.
The presence of categories of anti-gender actors was expressed as a percentage (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Anti-gender actors percentages
The highest-scoring category is that of religious actors. They were included as anti-gender actors in 72,88% of articles. In the literature, the term ‘religious actors’ refers to a variety of religious institutions. However, studies on anti-gender politics primarily focus on the Catholic Church.
Activists constitute the second-highest category (59,32%) mentioned. While activists can be seen as a separate category of anti-gender actors, the term ‘activist’ often seems to be a collective term for all individuals who participate in anti-gender activities and discourse.
Activists are followed by the category “organisations”, which includes NGOs and civil society organisations (52,54%). Political parties and politicians follow with the same percentage (44,07%). The next category is scholars and experts (37,29%). Experts include professionals, academics, and people who are active in both academia and the activist world.
States and its institutions are less often seen as anti-gender actors compared to the above-mentioned categories (20,34%). This low percentage could result from the ambiguous role of the state institutions: they may not openly identify as an anti-gender actor but fund anti-gender groups. An example of this is the Croatian state funding for the UIO initiative. The category of “other”, which includes various types of actors not mentioned frequently enough to warrant their own category (journalists, lawyers, economic institutions, influencers …), accounts for 16,95%.
One category is notably less present in comparison with the others, namely interest groups. They are mentioned as anti-gender actors in only 10,17% of the articles. Given that lobbying is often recognised as a strategy of anti-gender actors to influence policies, it is rather surprising that the interest groups are seldom included as relevant actors in the literature on anti-gender politics.
A new perspective
Kollman (1998) notes: “outside lobbying as a general strategy is common. It is not reserved for groups with activist organizational cultures or histories of grassroots mobilization”. Kollman points to interest organisations as important players in changing public policy. The key features of interest organisations set them apart from other actors. Interest organisations are organised forms of political behaviour that attempt to influence policy outcomes through informal interactions with politicians and bureaucrats. An interest group approach on anti-gender actors would also open several new avenues in anti-gender politics research.
First, it allows observers to include more anti-gender actors who fall out of the analytical scope of social movement studies. For instance, Kollman points to the organised forces behind mass expressions of public concern, coordinating and mobilising citizens behind a common message.
Second, this approach sheds light on what happens behind the scenes. Since outside lobbying serves to reinforce inside lobbying, applying an interest group framework helps uncover these less visible, inside strategies that anti-gender actors use to influence gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights debates.
Third, as Baumgartner and Jones (1991) argue, there are a variety of venues in which a political issue can be discussed, most of which do not involve mass mobilisations. An interest group perspective is very useful here, since interest organisations operate across a broader range of venues than social movement actors do.
Fourth, agenda setting is important. An issue must first find its way onto the political agenda before it can be discussed as a policy issue. Interest groups are vital players in pushing an issue on the agenda or, instead, keeping something off the agenda.
Fifth, adopting an interest group approach shifts the analytical focus away from broad movement strategies (e.g. social media usage and framing) towards individual characteristics and strategies of specific organisations. This enables us to research differences within the broader population of anti-gender actors.
Finally, anti-gender actors do defend their own interests, even if framed as the general will, general concern, or normality. Putting the concept of interest centre stage not only provides new possibilities in future research that enable different ways of understanding anti-gender actors, it also makes it crystal clear what it is all about in the end.
Author: Yentl Verdonck is Research Assistant with the Belgian CCINDLE team (University of Antwerp). For this blog, Petra Meier, Rylan Verlooy, and Bastiaan Redert provided input.
You can click here for a full list of the academic literature utilised in this study.