Multidimensional issue preferences of the European lavender vote

ABSTRACT

Are lesbian, gay and bisexual voters in Western Europe europhile globalists or eurosceptic nativists? The recently established ‘sexuality gap’ between lavender voters and heterosexuals in Western Europe shows that LGBs are more likely to support left-leaning parties and identify ideologically with the left than their heterosexual peers. We know very little, however, about how this gap plays out in the multidimensional space in Europe where cultural concerns like immigration and EU integration are increasingly important. In this paper, I use cumulative data from the European Social Survey to investigate the impact of LGB status on support for EU integration and immigration. The results show, in line with theoretical expectations regarding the socializing effect of the LGB experience in encouraging support for social liberalism, that lavender voters in Western Europe are significantly more pro-integrationist and pro-immigration than comparable heterosexuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroscepticism
• GAL-TAN
• immigration
• LGBT+ voters
• nativism
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to individuals at the Juan March Institute (Madrid) for their comments on an earlier iteration of this article. I am also indebted to the three anonymous reviewers whose critical reading and recommended amendments have greatly improved the paper since its initial submission.

Data availability statement

Supporting data and materials for this article can be accessed on the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DCLHDQ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Trans individuals (T) and other sexual minorities (+) are a core group within the LGB(T+) community but they are, regrettably, not included in this study given the inability to identify these individuals with the available data. I refer to individuals as LGB and homosexual interchangeably.

2 During an April 2017 speech to the party, Weidel stated that she was in the AfD not despite being a lesbian but because she was a lesbian, arguing that the AfD was the only party capable of stopping ‘Muslim gangs’ who were out to hunt homosexuals in Germany.

3 Central and Eastern European countries cannot be included in the analysis given the measurement strategy identifies zero LGBs in some of these states. This is likely the product of the low social acceptance of homosexuality biasing responses to questions on household composition (Turnbull-Dugarte, 2020a).

4 I assume that the potential for social desirability bias in responses will be equally distributed across sexualities.

5 Those not looking for work, homemakers or other non-remunerated roles.

6 An alternative operationalization using immigrant numbers provides similar findings (Table A3).

7 Country clustering serves a substitute for multi-level modelling with a low level-2 N (Steenbergen & Jones, 2002). Sampling and population weights are also applied.

8 Reported effect sizes may be underestimating the real magnitude given the partner-inferred measurement strategy used. See Schnabel (2018) for a comparison.

9 Replicating the moderation using an alternative for economic status (see Figure A4) provides the same findings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte

Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Southampton. He holds a PhD in Political Science from King’s College London. His work has been published in outlets such as the European Journal of Political Research and West European Politics.