Threats and Morality. Do women vote for right-wing parties because they perceive a threat for their families?
Alessia Valmori, Luciana Carraro & Luigi Castelli
Sociological studies have been conducted in the last years demonstrating that women are voting more and more for right-wing extremist parties. In fact, it seems that even if men are still the great majority of voters, the difference between the two social groups is now narrowing. In addition to that, it appears that women, when supporting these parties, are stricter in their opinions than men. It is argued that the increasing number of women supporting right-wing ideologies may be due to a specific threat, arousing in women a certain idea of danger that undermines the moral foundations they consider important: Harm, Justice, Purity and Family (Morality as Cooperation scale). First of all, an exploratory study will be presented aimed to understand which are the most frequent perceived threats by the population and to investigate which moral foundations are relevant in the discourse about the emerged threats. To explore this, tweets of main Italian political leaders and articles written by important Italian newspapers were analyzed.
Afterwards, three studies will be implemented in order to understand if these threats could play a different role considering: a) the gender b) the political orientation of the participant and c) the subject under threat. It is expected that when family is under menace, female in Italian context, will react similar as if the threat was directed to the self.
Italiano 
English