(iPoster) How Educational Attainment Drives LGBTQ+ Political Participation

• In Event: Poster Session: Racial, Ethnic, Gender, LGBTQ+ Politics & Sexuality and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Sexuality & Politics

Abstract

LGBTQ+ individuals vote at considerably higher rates than their peers (GLAAD 2024; Brookings 2024). With the percentage of the U.S. population who identify as either lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender growing (Gallup 2024), LGBTQ+ voters have the potential to fundamentally alter the electorate–especially if they vote more consistently than non-LGBTQ+ voters. At the same time, some members of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly gay men, have outpaced their peers in educational attainment (Mittleman 2022), a well-established predictor of political participation (Willeck & Mendelberg 2022). Given the well-documented and robust relationship between educational attainment and voter participation (Sondheimer & Green 2010; Smets & Van Ham 2013), this paper explores how education helps lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals participate in politics. Specifically, this paper seeks to document the relationship between education and voting, for a community whose rights are increasingly politically contested.

Using pooled data from the CES Cumulative Common Content for national elections between 2016 and 2024, which includes approximately 30,000 LGBTQ+ respondents, I document the participation gaps in verified voting and other self-reported forms of political participation between the LGBTQ+ community and their non-LGBTQ+ peers. Focusing on educational attainment, I then estimate a Blinder-Oaxaca-Kitagawa decomposition for each group to understand how educational attainment and other important demographic factors, such as sex, age, partisanship, ideology, and income influence LGBTQ+ voting rates. Such approaches have similarly been used to document gender gaps in voting (Arnzen & Cohodes 2025) and political knowledge (Dow 2009). This decomposition estimates how much of a gap in an outcome is attributable to specific characteristics (endowments) and returns to those characteristics (coefficients) for two groups, illustrating how much of the outcome can be explained by differential levels of factors rather than differential returns to those factors (unexplained).

In the data, LGBTQ+ voters outvote their peers considerably. For gay men, a significant majority of this gap can be explained by their higher educational attainment levels, while the remaining unexplained portion accounts for other social, cultural, and political factors that shape political participation. I additionally conduct further analyses investigating the role of educational attainment for each lesbian, bisexual men, bisexual women, and transgender voters separately. Results consistently underscore the important role that education plays in political participation, though the unexplained portions are larger for these groups. Taken together, these findings demonstrate how, despite broad importance of educational attainment for political participation, a variety of other factors beyond individual characteristics and endowments drive the exceptionally high levels of political participation for LGBTQ+ individuals. However, so long as gay men continue to achieve higher levels of educational attainment, they will continue to outvote nearly every other group of individuals.

Author

• Cameron Arnzen, Brown University