There's a tidy, comforting story about gender equality in Europe: the more a country absorbs EU norms on equality, the more women get pulled into political life, and the gender gap in protest activity should gradually shrink. A new study, drawing on European Values Study data from 45 European and neighboring countries and nearly 166,000 respondents across almost two decades, shows that reality is far messier.
Three forces pulling in different directions
The core idea is simple: people's political engagement doesn't form in a vacuum, it sits at the intersection of three processes. First, there's the diffusion of EU gender-equality norms: directives, funding, NGO programs. Second, there's conservative counter-mobilization: wherever equality norms get framed as an ideology imposed from outside, organized resistance forms, from church networks to populist parties. Third, there's what people actually believe about gender roles, and it turns out those beliefs are rarely tidy or consistent.
That's where the first surprising twist shows up. People don't sort neatly into "traditionalists" and "egalitarians." Using latent class analysis, the study identifies five attitudinal profiles, ranging from consistent traditionalists (who see the housewife role as a calling) to consistent egalitarians (equality both at work and at home). But between them sits a whole spectrum of hybrid positions. Take people who fully support women having careers and independence, yet genuinely believe that motherhood is where a woman finds her deepest fulfillment. That's not a contradiction in their minds, it's a stable, internally coherent configuration, and it shows up in nearly a third of respondents.
The backlash amplification hypothesis
The paper's central idea is that the effect of EU equality norms depends on how strongly organized conservative pushback is in a given country. Where conservative mobilization is weak, EU norms work as expected, narrowing the gender gap in protest participation. But where conservative forces are organizationally strong, that same norm diffusion unexpectedly widens the gap: men start protesting more than women.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the logic clicks once you think of the mass protests against Poland's abortion ban, or the conservative counter-rallies defending the "traditional family" in Hungary. The same institutional process, moving closer to European standards, can simultaneously mobilize the feminist movement and its opponents. Which wave ends up bigger depends on the specific country.
The data backs this pattern up, but selectively. The effect is clearest in low-effort protest, signing petitions, joining boycotts. Under weak conservative mobilization, women's participation here rises faster than men's; under moderate mobilization, both grow in parallel; under strong mobilization, men's participation overtakes women's, flipping the gap entirely. In more demanding forms of protest, demonstrations, strikes, the pattern is weaker, and on the basic question of whether to protest at all, the gender difference is nearly indifferent to context.
Hybrid attitudes aren't noise, they're a lever
The second major finding concerns those hybrid profiles. It turns out people with mixed views, neither committed traditionalists nor committed egalitarians, react most sharply to conservative mobilization in countries with strong EU norm diffusion. And the stronger that diffusion gets, the weaker this group's response to conservative pressure becomes, as if the norms act as a kind of buffer. For consistent traditionalists and consistent egalitarians alike, this effect barely registers: their positions are already settled.
What this means
The practical takeaway is that promoting equality can't run on a universal formula of "just diffuse the norms and the gap will close." The effect depends on the local political landscape: how organized the conservative opposition is, how resilient democratic institutions are, and which combinations of attitudes dominate among the population. Gender equality in Europe isn't a line moving steadily forward, it's a field of tension where progress in one place can trigger backlash in another, both fed by the very same source: the norm diffusion that was meant to bring people together in the first place.
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About this study
This article is a new output of the NCN (National Science Centre, Poland) grant "Gender Gaps in Political Participation: Examining the Relationships Between Gender Equality and Gender-Role Attitudes in Europe, 1999–2021" (Contract No. UMO-2023/51/D/HS6/00026), led by Dr. Olga Lavrinenko, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, who serves as the project's Principal Investigator.
The analysis draws on three waves of the European Values Study (1999, 2008, 2017/2018), merged with country-level indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, the World Bank, and UNDP, covering more than 160,000 respondents across 45 European and neighboring states. Gender-role attitudes were modeled using latent class analysis; protest participation and its gender gaps were estimated with multinomial logistic regression and cross-level interactions.
Full citation: Lavrinenko, O. Gendered protest in Europe: EU norm diffusion, conservative backlash, and attitudinal hybridization. Comparative European Politics 24, 37 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-026-00480-9
Open access, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.