The Gender Gap Report - Special Issue: Bulgaria's Insecurity Fork

Bulgaria has occupied an ambiguous position in Southeast Europe since its accession to the European Union in 2007. Economic growth has been real but uneven, and the country remains the EU's poorest member state by GDP per capita. Full accession to the Schengen area in 2025 marked a milestone of integration, but the political landscape has been defined by instability — six parliamentary elections in three years between 2021 and 2024. Against this backdrop, young Bulgarians are forming their views about democracy, rights, and who belongs in the political community. Their answers reveal a gender divide that is large, selective, and - most importantly - shaped by how secure young people feel about their economic lives.

The latest special issue of The Gender Gap Report, authored by Semir Dzebo and based on the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung's 2024 Southeast Europe Youth Study surveying 750 young people aged 14–29 in Bulgaria, examines the interaction between gender and economic insecurity. It asks whether hardship pushes young men and women in opposite directions, with men tilting toward exclusion and authoritarianism while women moving toward solidarity and rights expansion. It analyses which attitudes divide them most sharply - and which, surprisingly, do not divide them at all. And it asks why a mechanism that appears to operate across the region - namely the idea that economic pressure amplifies gender divides - fails to materialise in Bulgaria.

The findings complicate the hypothesis. Young men and women diverge most on LGBTQ+ rights, where 41.7% of men say LGBTQ+ people have "too many rights" compared to 23.6% of women, and on support for dictatorship, which 23.5% of men versus 13.5% of women view as “sometimes preferable”. Yet they converge almost entirely on refugees, racial hierarchy, and cultural protectionism. Young women are far more likely to perceive rights deficits for women, the poor, and young people. Strikingly, the two groups' views on democracy pull in seemingly opposite directions at once: young men are more likely than women to say democracy is always preferable (40.3% versus 29.6%), yet also more likely to endorse dictatorship as sometimes better. The report leaves this tension unresolved, observing only that women's greater sensitivity to rights deficits does not translate into stronger attachment to democratic governance as a principle. And most fundamentally, the insecurity fork does not hold: the gender gap does not widen under economic pressure, and gender remains a strong predictor of attitudes regardless of household finances. Across Southeast Europe the mechanism does appear in pooled data, but it is driven by specific countries such as Albania and Romania rather than operating uniformly.

Read the full analysis here.