Explaining the Sexuality Gap in Protest Participation

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the relationship between sexual orientations and the protest actions of adults in the United States. Drawing from General Social Survey data from 1996 to 2004, we found that lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were more than twice as likely to protest as heterosexuals. To account for this sexuality gap, we used Patrick Egan’s (2008) political distinctiveness theories to identify possible underlying causes of these protesting differences. After running several regressions, we found that sexuality and protesting relationships were moderated by issues of educational attainment, marital statuses, metropolitan residencies, political partisanships, governmental grievances, and gender role expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Protesting
• gays and lesbians
• essentialism
• social networks
• discrimination

Notes

^1. To address issues of heteroscedasticity, we ran some exploratory regressions with year as a dummy variable. Treating time as a control largely removes issues of autocorrelations from the regression estimates (Stimson, 1985), but our tables do not include these regressions since time controls failed to substantively alter the findings presented in this study.