Who wins the British lavender vote? (Mostly) Labour

ABSTRACT

Does sexuality shape electoral behavior in British elections? Relying on data from 10,290 individuals, this article provides the first case study analysis of a sexuality gap between heterosexuals and self-identified lesbian, gay and bisexuals in Britain. Testing the assumption that LGB voters are electorally incentivized to vote for socially liberal parties that advocate pro-LGBT+ positions, empirically I find that Britain's lavender voters are significantly more supportive of the UK's socially liberal parties. The sexuality gap is substantive with LGBs 9.65 percentage-points more likely to vote for Labour and 13.64 percentage-points more likely to vote for any socially liberal party via-à-vis their heterosexual peers. Importantly, the sexuality gap holds across the youngest cohort of the electorate who became of political age after the introduction of same-sex marriage. Finally, whilst there is a strong amount of support for the Liberal Democrats who acted as an entrepreneurial advocate of LGBT+ rights in the UK, evidence suggests that a lack of significantly increased electoral support from LGBs at the polls may be the result of strategic concerns. The results are important as they highlight the substantive role of sexuality in shaping electoral choices which has hereto not been considered in models of British electoral behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ
• voting behavior
• sexuality
• United Kingdom
• gay vote‌

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Section 28 prohibited the discussion of homosexuality in schools and by local authorities. The law aimed at stopping what the Conservatives viewed as the “promotion” of homosexuality and was strongly opposed by gay rights proponents at the time. Thatcher stated that “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. […]. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life” (Thatcher 1988).

2 Response to question: “Please say to what extent you agree or disagree with each of the following statements, ‘Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish.’” Proportions reported indicate those who responded either “Strongly agree” or “Agree.”

3 Former Chief Secretary of the Treasury, David Laws, claims that Primer Minister, David Cameron, confessed that “Gay marriage has been an absolute disaster. It has absolutely split my party,” that legislating for SSM was a “big mistake” and that it played a role in the party's losses to UKIP at the local elections that took place shortly afterwards (Laws 2016). This account is supported by D’Ancona (2014) as well as comments from the former Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, during an interview for the BBC documentary “The Cameron Years” (2019).

4 This list of mechanisms is not exclusionary. Of note is that the lived experience of being “othered” and discriminated against by the heterosexual majority also plays an important role (Bailey 1999; Egan 2012; Kleiman, Spanierman, and Smith 2015; Page 2018; Schnabel 2018).

5 The CHES dataset (Polk et al. 2017) provides estimates of party positions on different ideological dimensions and policy issues from across different European countries. It includes data of expert estimates of party positions from 1999 to 2019. Reliability scores comparing expert positions provided by CHES to those captured in quantitative text analysis of party manifestos, finds CHES values to be valid and reliable source of party positions (Hooghe et al. 2010).

6 The CHES questionnaire explicitly uses the example of homosexuality to describe to expert respondents what the 0 “Strongly supports liberal policies” to 10 “Strongly opposes liberal policies” social lifestyle position scale is seeking to capture.

7 Detailed information regarding the technical administration of wave 9 and recommended weighting and clustering procedures are available on the Understanding Society webpage: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/technical-reports

Replicating the main models with unweighted analyses does not alter our main findings although likely produce estimates that are not reflective of the population. Adding a control variable survey mode does not alter the results (Figure A6).

8 This method is increasingly common given the lack of direct survey instruments that ask respondents about sexual orientation (Black et al. 2000; Fischer, Kalmijn, and Steinmetz 2016; Kühne, Kroh, and Richter 2019).

9 Those identified as NILF include those who are unemployed but not actively seeking work, unenumerated domestic workers and carers, and those on long-term unpaid leave.

10 The full regression output of the multinomial models, including alternative and additional party choices, is reported in the online appendix. Re-estimating the model using abstention as the baseline category, for example, does not alter the main conclusions. England-only models are also reported.

11 Note, however, that whilst feelings of voter-party approximation help to identify the divergence between legitimate voter preferences for partisan alternatives and votes cast, it may be the case that voters also incorporate concerns over the credibility gap into their decisions on which party they feel closest too.