Today, young women seem increasingly to align with left-wing, feminist, and green ideologies, while young men are gravitating towards right-wing populism and conservatism. This polarisation is prominent especially in online environments and social media, and is linked to the rise of right-wing populism, debates around gender (equality), climate change, and identity politics.
Deploying an interdisciplinary approach, the project examines the phenomenon through the concept of affective identities, that is, how the interaction between political mobilisation, social identities, and emotions contributes to gender polarisation among youth. The project comprises four work packages at three interrelated levels: the supply (political elites) and demand (perspectives of young people) levels as well as their nodal points (interactions between politicians, influencers and their young audiences), both on- and offline, providing an unprecedented understanding of gender polarisation among youth.
Methodologically, the project relies on and integrates critical, affective-discursive, and multimodal discourse analytic research traditions. It deploys a vast array of data from both online and offline settings, including political mobilisation and influencing; individual and focus group interviews, and interactions among politicians and followers on social media.
Theoretically, the project contributes to research on polarisation by bringing the social identity approach, discursive research, and intersectionality theory into interplay, demonstrating, first, their potential for mutually enriching each other, and second, the importance of such an integrative approach for examining contemporary societal phenomena such as gender polarisation among young people.
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland (2025–2029) and situated at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.