🔎 Research Question: How and why does party activism in populist radical right (PRR) parties differ between women and men? The existing literature predicts lower activity by women because of lower motivations, weaker party ties, and greater sensitivity to stigma.

📋 What Was Tested and How:

• Expectations drawn from the literature on gender and party politics: women will be less active due to (1) lower motivations to participate, (2) weaker embedding in party networks, and (3) higher sensitivity to stigma.
• Original survey data from thousands of party members of the League (Italy) and the Sweden Democrats were used to measure levels of activism, network embedding, motivations, and stigma sensitivity.

📈 Key Findings:

• Contrary to expectations, women PRR party members are overall more active than men.
• The higher activity of women is explained by greater embedding in party networks: stronger ties to the party translate into higher participation.
• The empirical pattern holds across the two large PRR parties surveyed (the League and the Sweden Democrats) and is robust to the measures employed.

💡 Why It Matters:

• This surprising result challenges assumptions about female disengagement from extremist or exclusionary parties and reframes how gender operates inside party organizations.
• Findings have implications for theories of descriptive and organizational representation and for understanding the growing normalization of PRR politics, since active women may shape party outreach, recruitment, and legitimacy.

🧾 Bottom Line: Women in these two major PRR parties are not marginal activists; their stronger network ties make them more active than men, reshaping expectations about gender dynamics within populist radical right organizations.