What Causes LGBTQ Linked Fate?

• In Event: LGBTQ Political Unity and Division

Abstract

What causes LGBTQ linked fate? Current scholarship, based mostly on the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the US, suggests that linked fate derives primarily from material interests (shared economic concerns) or socialization (common experiences). Our research will disentangle these mechanisms as sources of LGBTQ group coherence. We use data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey LGBTQ oversample, including an embedded priming experiment, to examine the extent to which material and symbolic concerns drive LGBTQ linked fate and the extent to which LGBTQ individuals have linked fate with their own sub-group(s) of the LGBTQ community as opposed to the broader LGBTQ communities. Our study uses a priming experiment that examines the content of linked fate across a range of groups by randomly priming them with possible arguments (material or social) for linked fate. Previous experiments with linked fate have examined the effects of a multi-issue prime (Gay, Hochschild, and White, 2016) or a material prime (Donnelly, forthcoming), but none have compared primes across multiple dimensions. Doing so allows us to determine whether one driver is stronger than another, and whether this varies by group. Our results speak both to the growing body of work on LGBTQ political behaviour and to research on linked fate in racial and ethnic politics.

Authors

• Julie Moreau, University of Toronto

• Michael J. Donnelly, University of Toronto

• Quinn Albaugh, Queen's University