No dia 22 de Janeiro, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Pontificial Catholic University of Chile) será o orador convidado de um Seminário Conjunto dos Grupos de Investigação SPARC & RIGOP, sobre o tema Explaining Support for Trump in Latin America: The Role of Anti-Feminist Attitudes. A partir das 14h30, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

Abstract: In recent years, anti-feminist discourses have gained visibility and support worldwide. However, to date, there is limited empirical evidence on how many people hold anti-feminist attitudes and which characteristics distinguish them. To address this research gap, we analyze novel public opinion data from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and El Salvador. Our results show that approximately one third of the population in these countries expresses anti-feminist attitudes. Notably, being male, high levels of religiosity, moral conservatism, and authoritarian predispositions are consistently associated with higher levels of anti-feminism across all five countries. Moreover, we use anti-feminist attitudes to predict individuals’ willingness to vote for Donald Trump and find a positive association. In fact, anti-feminist attitudes explain support for Trump much better than anti-immigration attitudes. This finding suggests that opposition to feminism constitutes a common element in the electoral base of the Latin American far right.

Bio: I am a full professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontificial Catholic University of Chile, an associate researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and director of the Laboratory for the Study of the Far Right (ultra-lab). I am director of research and postgraduate studies of the Faculty of History, Geography and Political Science at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

I received my PhD in political science from the Humboldt-University of Berlin and after this I was a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College at Oxford University and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). Before obtaining my current position, I worked as a professor at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and as a Marie-Curie research fellow at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. In recent years I have been a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Italy, Sciences Po in France and Uppsala University in Sweden.

Together with Cas Mudde (University of Georgia), I co-authored the book Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), which has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai, among others. My primary research focus is comparative politics and nowadays I am particularly interested in studying the far-right in Latin America within a broader comparative perspective.