How “Gay” Can You Go? Sexual Orientation, Gender Typicality, and Electability

• In Event: Poster Session: LGBTQI+ Power and Politics & Human Rights
  In Poster Session: Celebrating Fifty Years of Queer Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Poster Session: LGBTQI+ Power and Politics

Abstract

Recently, scholars have argued that political candidates’ sexual orientation has become a non-issue in elections in Western democracies. However, in evaluating the claim that sexual orientation is a non-issue for voters, two key questions must be asked: What kind of gay candidates face little to no discrimination at the ballot box? And what type of voters no longer care if a candidate is gay or straight?

So far, most researchers have treated all gay candidates alike, failing to consider that a key feature distinguishing them—gender typicality—might be critical to their electoral prospects. The electoral bias against gay candidates might be a function of either bias based on sexual orientation or bias based on gender typicality—or their interaction. In this paper, I explore both to pry apart their influence. Relying on the literatures on gender categorization and cognitive fluency, I argue that gender atypicality has a negative effect on candidates’ probability of being elected.

Also unclear from prior work on LGBTQ politics is what kind of voters no longer penalize gay candidates. Specifically, while scholars have identified certain demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, ideology, and religiosity) as strong predictors of voters’ likelihood to hold prejudice against gay candidates, we still know relatively little about the psychological factors undergirding voters’ evaluation of gay or, for that matter, gender atypical candidates. In this paper, therefore, I examine three factors that social and political psychologists have determined to be key in predicting prejudiced behavior: psychological need for order and certainty, explicit anti-minority biases, and partisanship.

In testing my hypotheses, I use a survey experiment where I present respondents with hypothetical co-partisan primary candidates for U.S. Congress. To manipulate a candidate’s gender typicality, I rely on manipulating their face (via Psychomorph) and voice (via Praat).

Results from two pre-registered studies offer support for my theory. Namely, I show that gender atypicality, indeed, carries a negative effect for a candidate’s electoral prospects; I find that voters— even young, predominantly liberal voters—express lower likelihood of supporting gender atypical candidates. In fact, I gender atypicality has a negative average effect on both gay and straight candidates’ probability of being elected. Furthermore, I shed light on some of the psychological mechanisms undergirding identity-based discrimination in voting. Specifically, I show that voters who have a higher psychological need for order and certainty are more likely to penalize candidates for being gay as are voters who are high in outright anti-gay hostility.

I further show that partisanship moderates the penalty faced by gay candidates—I find that Republicans penalize gay candidates while Democrats actually prefer them. Contrary to my expectations, however, partisanship does not seem to moderate the penalty imposed on gender atypical candidates. Both Democrats and Republicans penalize gender atypical candidates and there is no statistically significant difference in the extent to which they do so. As such, while the ideal Republican candidate is one who is gender typical and straight, the ideal Democratic candidate appears to be a candidate who is gay but “acts straight.”

Overall, this paper makes three main contributions. First, I break new ground by bringing gender typicality into the debate about what attributes shape the electability of gay candidates. Second, I advance scholarly understanding of some of the psychological mechanisms undergirding identity-based discrimination in voting. Finally, I showcase the promise of voice stimuli, long underutilized in political science, for studying biases and discrimination.

Author

• Martin Naunov, UNC - Chapel Hill