When did believing in equality become radical?

Equality remains a widely shared democratic principle. Across the region, young people broadly support fairness, equal treatment, and greater political inclusion. Yet they differ systematically in how they recognise inequality, how they expect equality to function in practice, and whether they see themselves as equal participants in democratic life.

Across Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Türkiye, young men and women often endorse the same democratic ideals while drawing different conclusions about whether political institutions are accessible, whether rights are equally protected, and whether opportunities are genuinely equal. The principle remains shared, but its practical meaning is no longer consistently understood in the same way.

When shared principles produce different democratic realities

One of the clearest examples comes from political participation. Across the region, young people broadly agree that political systems do not adequately represent youth. The diagnosis is remarkably consistent. However, the response is anything but.

Young men consistently report higher political interest, higher self-assessed political knowledge, and greater willingness to take on political functions. Young women, by contrast, are more likely to support the principle that young people should have a greater voice in politics, yet are substantially less likely to see themselves as actors within institutional politics.

Across the region, willingness to take on a political function displays the widest gender gap in the series, reaching double digits in most countries and peaking in cases such as Slovenia, where around half of young men report willingness compared with fewer than one in five young women.

The findings suggest that young men and young women do not experience democratic institutions as equally responsive to their participation. Formal opportunities may be shared, but expectations of meaningful influence are not.

This becomes even clearer when looking at political engagement among equally interested young people. Across the Gender Gap Series, young women who express high political interest still consistently assess their own political knowledge lower than equally interested young men. Higher education increases engagement for both genders, but it does not eliminate these differences in self-assessment or willingness to participate.

These findings suggest that equal participation cannot simply be expected to follow from formal rights, educational attainment, or political interest. It also depends on whether institutions are experienced as responsive and consequential. Where expectations of impact differ, equal rights do not automatically translate into equal participation.

Equality beyond formal rights

The same pattern extends beyond politics. Equality is not only about the formal distribution of rights, but also about how inequality itself is recognised.

Across the region, young women are consistently more likely than young men to identify rights deficits affecting women, LGBTQ+ people, ethnic minorities, young people, and people living in poverty. These differences are strongest in identity-based inequalities, while becoming noticeably smaller in relation to economic inequality.

Poverty stands out as one of the few areas where perceptions are comparatively aligned across genders. Economic disadvantage is broadly recognised as a rights issue even where understandings of other forms of inequality diverge.

Importantly, these differences in perception cannot be explained simply by differences in prejudice. Across the regional dataset, attitudes towards ethnic minorities or immigrants often differ only modestly between young men and women. Yet their assessments of whether these groups enjoy equal rights differ much more substantially. Equality, in other words, is not only about attitudes towards others. It is also about how people judge whether institutions recognise, protect, and include different groups within society.

Democracy also shapes everyday life

The same dynamic appears in expectations about work, relationships, and family life. Across these domains, young men and women generally endorse similar egalitarian aspirations, but differ in how they expect those aspirations to be realised.

Young women are more likely to anticipate structural barriers in the labour market, persistent inequalities in care work, and continuing economic dependency within households. Young men are more likely to expect outcomes to reflect individual merit and responsibilities to be shared more equally. The disagreement is therefore less about the desirability of equality than about expectations of how far existing institutions are capable of delivering it.

Taken together, these findings reveal a consistent pattern. Shared democratic principles do not necessarily produce shared democratic realities. The same commitment to equality can coexist with different perceptions of inequality, different expectations of institutions, and different assumptions about how society works.

What this means for democracy

This matters because democracy depends on more than constitutional guarantees. It also depends on a sufficiently shared understanding of what equality requires in practice.

The Gender Gap Series does not show that young people have abandoned equality as a democratic value. On the contrary, support for fairness, inclusion, and equal treatment remains widespread across Southeast Europe. What varies is how equality is interpreted, where inequality is recognised, and whether democratic institutions are perceived as capable of delivering on their promises.

That distinction is more than analytical. Where inequality is understood differently, democratic priorities inevitably diverge. Where participation is experienced differently, formal rights alone cannot secure equal democratic engagement. These differences shape public debates not around whether equality matters, but around what equality requires in practice.

Conclusion

Believing in equality itself did not become radical. What has changed is that equality no longer functions as a uniformly shared understanding of social and political reality. Across Southeast Europe, equality remains a widely shared democratic aspiration, but it is interpreted, experienced, and expected in different ways across groups and domains.

Democracy depends not only on shared values, but also on sufficiently shared understandings of what those values require in practice. The evidence from the Gender Gap Series suggests that this shared understanding can no longer be taken for granted.

What happens to democracy when equality remains a shared value but no longer has a shared meaning? The answer is not predetermined.

The data also offer reason for hope. Among the youngest respondents, aged 14 to 18, young women and young men are almost indistinguishable in their views. The gender divide emerges only in early adulthood, as young women move towards more egalitarian positions while young men largely hold steady. In other words, this gap is not fixed or inevitable. It develops during a period when civic education, democratic participation, and meaningful dialogue can still shape how an entire generation understands equality before those differences become more firmly entrenched.

At a time when democratic participation, equal rights, and fairness are increasingly dismissed as ideological rather than defended as democratic foundations, evidence matters. It reminds us that democracy is sustained not only by elections and institutions, but by a shared commitment to equality and participation.

If believing in equality and democratic participation is radical today, we choose to remain radical.