As Sonya Michel showed in her ARC-GS blog, the majority of white women in the US voted for Donald Trump, despite his many sexist comments. His popularity was biggest among lower educated white women, but also among college-educated white women he obtained 45 per cent of the vote. How could this happen? Below I will shortly react to the rich explanations that Michel already provided. After that I will reflect on possible parallels in the Netherlands. Does Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) take a similar position on gender-related issues as Trump did? And why would Dutch women (not) vote for the PVV?

Following up on Michel’s cultural explanation for women supporting Trump, I want to refer to the revealing book ‘Strangers in their own land’, by Arlie Hochschild (2016). Through an ethnographic study of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, Hochschild shows the importance of ‘emotional self-interest’. While political scientists are racking their brains over the question why people vote for the Republican Party against their economic self-interest, Hochschild argues that people can also vote out of emotional self-interest. The white Louisianans that Hochschild studied were struggling with economic downturn and the loss of stable long-term employment. Meanwhile, they felt culturally marginalized and neglected by ‘the Liberals’ in Washington, who ridiculed their views on abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race and refugees. And then came Trump, who promised to make their America great again, and who said exactly the politically incorrect things that they felt but hadn’t dare to say out loud for a long time. Supporting Trump was in their emotional self-interest.

What I take from Hochschild’s research, is that there are many white American women in ‘Flyover country’ for whom the ideas propagated by Trump resonated with their personal beliefs and emotions. This may apply to low as well as highly educated women. Place matters here: as Hochschild points out, going to Louisiana State University does not at all expose you to the same liberal, progressive or feminist ideas as going to the University of California in Berkeley. For some of these women in the US heartland, Trump’s blatant sexism might have been disturbing, for others better childcare facilities might be in their personal interest, but they ‘held their noses’ because Trump’s promise to make their America great again outweighed these – for them – minor issues.

I now turn to the Netherlands and the position of Wilders and his Party for Freedom on gender-related issues. There are similarity between Trump and Wilders in their hate for any form of affirmative action or quota and in their depiction of Muslim immigrants as the greatest threat for the nation’s safety in general and for blond women in particular. Yet there are differences too: Wilders does not oppose current liberal Dutch abortion regulations, in fact abortion is an issue he carefully avoids altogether. Meanwhile, Wilders is a strong supporter of gay rights, which he presents as being threatened by, again, Muslim immigrants. This doesn’t mean Wilders’ position is progressive. It’s merely opportunistic. On gender-related issues that cannot directly be linked to immigrant threats, such as the lack of high-quality childcare or decent paid parental leave, the Party for Freedom does not have any ambitions.

Will Dutch women vote for Wilders? In previous elections, support for the PVV was stronger among men than among women. For the upcoming 2017 election, two women were placed high on the PVV’s electoral list, directly behind Wilders. Perhaps this is a deliberate strategy to appeal to more female voters. Yet my expectation is that, just as in the US, gender-related issues will play a much smaller role in voters’ decision to support the Party for Freedom than appeals to emotions such as the fear of immigrants.

To conclude, to really understand what drives people, women as well as men, to support radical right wing parties, there is a need for more in depth, qualitative research to supplement the already rich body of quantitative research on this topic. Therefore, I hope Hochschild’s work will prove to be a source of inspiration for scholars in Europe.