Political Distinctiveness and Diversity among LGBT Americans

• In Event: Exploring Public Opinion and Public Policy Surrounding LGBTQ Interests in the US

Abstract

The political attitudes of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans are relatively under-studied in political science compared to other identity groups. Largely due to the challenges of collecting data on a small population, this nonetheless has obscured both the distinctiveness of LGBT people as a group and the diversity of attitudes within that coalition.

In this project, I triangulate between several data sources — pooled ANES surveys from 2008-2016 (N=559 LGB respondents); the 2016 CCES (N=4,946 LGBT respondents); and a Pew survey of LGBT Americans from 2013 (N=1,197) — and reach two important conclusions for the discipline’s understanding of these identities.

First, LGBT Americans’ attitudes are distinctively liberal compared to otherwise-similar straight and cisgender Americans. This is true for specific policy items concerning LGBT rights (as we might expect), but also for more general predispositions including ideology and partisan identity, and political behavior like vote choice. Analyses that don’t account for sexual orientation and gender identity are thus missing important dimensions of public opinion.

Second, the component groups of the LGBT coalition exhibit substantial diversity. Bisexual and transgender respondents are significantly less liberal than lesbians and gay men on each of these measures, although often still more liberal than straight or cisgender Americans. Despite their frequent erasure from media and academic accounts, bisexuals make up around half of the LGBT coalition — and their relative conservatism is thus a significant check on the overall liberalism of this community.

The paper thus offers several clear lessons for public opinion researchers. Given the distinctiveness of their political attitudes, we should be regularly incorporating LGBT identity into our analyses of public opinion alongside gender, racial, ethnic, class, and other identities. And given the diversity of the coalition’s attitudes, we should be cognizant of not treating LGBT people as an undifferentiated political bloc. Including measures of LGBT identity in our surveys and our analyses should become the norm moving forward.

Author

• Phil Jones, University of Delaware