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ABSTRACT
Cultural debates over gay rights have prompted a great deal of scholarship assessing the nature and resiliency of citizen attitudes toward homosexuality in American political life. We posit, however, that more attention should be devoted to LGBT individuals themselves as potential office holders. Specifically, we argue that in an era of increased affective polarization and partisan sorting, party identification of candidates, as well as affectual and ideological attitudes of voters, must be integrated into analyses of the effects of sexuality as a voting heuristic. Drawing on social identity and subtyping theories, we contend that candidate sexuality will influence attitudes about some candidates, but not others. We then present the results of an original survey experiment in which candidate partisanship and sexuality are both manipulated. The data reveal substantial support of our theory: while sexuality is a relevant consideration in the candidate evaluation process, both partisanship of candidates and political attributes of voters can severely condition its effects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 In 2016, nearly eighty percent of gay voters supported the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee (https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/meet-lgbtq-voters-who-backed-trump-n684181).
3 Respondents indicated both their overall conservatism and social conservatism using a 100-point sliding scale. While the two are strongly related (r = 0.81), focusing on social conservatism facilitates a more precise assessment of how sexuality cues impact voter behavior, as some individuals consider themselves conservative in certain policy domains but somewhat less or more so in others.
4 The number of Democrats identifying as conservative reached a record low in 2018 (https://news.gallup.com/poll/245813/leans-conservative-liberals-keep-recent-gains.aspx).
5 Descriptions of the treatment conditions are available in of the Appendix.
6 Question wording for the dependent variables is available in of the Appendix.
7 Over 85 percent of respondents accurately recalled the sexuality of the candidate.
8 of the Appendix contains descriptive statistics for the sample, as well as a comparison to the 2016 ANES Times Series web sample; of the Appendix contains the distribution of respondents across the treatment groups.
9 All statistics report two-tailed tests (95% level).
10 There is also greater support for the straight Democrat than the straight Republican (F (1, 320) = 24.99, Prob > F ≈ 0.000). We attribute this to several factors: first, Democrats express a greater willingness to support a straight Democrat (average score: 5.78/7) than Republicans do for a straight Republican (5.33/7). Second, Republicans are more supportive of straight Democrats (2.86/7) than Democrats are of straight Republicans (2.62/7). Finally, there are simply more Democrats (n=155) than Republicans (n=74) in this analysis.
11 Measurement specifications and distributions of negative partisanship and social conservatism can be found in of the Appendix.
12 The Appendix includes raw regression output tables that correspond to Figures 5 () and 6 ().
13 This decline is intuitive: Democrats holding more warmth toward Republicans would presumably be somewhat less supportive of a candidate that is not associated with the Republican Party.
14 The contrast p-value when Republican affect is “10” is 0.128; when affect is “20,” the p-value is 0.129.
15 The figure also projects that particularly socially liberal Republicans will prefer a gay Republican to a straight Republican. However, very few Republicans consider themselves to be extremely socially liberal (see Appendix ).