Campaign Contexts and the Gendered Implications for LGBTQ Candidates

• In Event: Comparing Queer Politics

Abstract

Like other countries in the Western world, Canada has recently seen an increase in the number of openly LGBTQ people elected to politics. Yet this diversity in the sexuality of political personnel masks a continuity in the gendered nature of our political institutions: LGBTQ representatives are more likely to be male than female. To date there are no studies available in Canada to fully understand this gap in the number of women and men LGBTQ elected politicians, but there is some evidence that LGBTQ candidate success is not linked to their gender (Everitt and Camp 2014). Instead, the issue seems to lie in the fact that that there might be a deficit of women LGBTQ candidates (Ashe 2020) and that when they do run for office they might do so in less competitive ridings (Everitt, Tremblay and Wagner 2019; Tremblay forthcoming).

In this paper we delve deeper into the explanations for this representational deficit by examining the electoral context under which out women and men LGBTQ candidates run for office. In doing so, we compare the experiences of all women and men LGBTQ candidates in the 2015 and 2019 Canadian federal elections (N=173). As this analysis will show, while women LGBTQ candidates are freed from certain gender diktats, their campaigns do not enjoy as favourable electoral conditions as their male counterparts.

Authors

• Joanna Everitt, University of New Brunswick Saint John

• Manon Tremblay, University of Ottawa