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When Do Voters Support the European Union’s Involvement in Gay Rights?

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Abstract

Commitment to the European Union’s gay rights standards remains weak in new EU members and countries applying for EU membership. If the EU’s standards have minimal consequences, then when do voters support the EU’s involvement in gay rights? The existing research misses a comparison of opinions between those who identify with gay people, and those who do not. Sexuality-based marginalization carried out by state institutions (political homophobia) motivates those who identify with gay people to support alternatives to their state’s authority. Using an original survey of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I find that those who identify more closely with gay people are more likely to support transferring control of gay rights to the EU. Using twenty-one surveys of EU member states, I find that in countries with high levels of political homophobia, those who report discrimination on the basis of sexuality exhibit higher levels of support for the EU.

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Fig. 1

Data source July 2015 survey of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Fig. 2

Data sources: 2014 European Social Survey 2014 ILGA country Rainbow Index

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Notes

  1. Replication materials are posted in Political Behavior’s dataverse.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Gettysburg College, 315 Glatfelter Hall, 300 North Washington Street, Gettysburg, PA, 17325, USA

    Douglas Page

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Correspondence to Douglas Page.

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Appendices

Appendices

Appendix 1: Robustness Check

As a robustness check, I replicate the hypothesis testing with women’s rights in order to check whether one’s feelings of closeness towards gay people associated with EU control of rights policies, or whether these feelings of closeness associated with EU control of gay rights policies in particular (which I theorize). In order to replicate this test, I use the variable in the survey based on the question:

Suppose that you learned that a political party wanted to give control of equal pay [between women and men] policies to the European Union. How much more likely or unlikely would you be to vote for that political party? Please indicate your views using any number on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means “Much less likely”, 5 means “Neither less or more likely”, and 10 means “Much more likely”.

The modal category for this variable is “5” with 36.7% of the respondents, and 53.7% of the respondents responded “5” or less (20% responded as “10” or much more likely). The mean for this variable is 6.1, compared to 3.0 for the analogous gay rights variable above, which further suggests the marginalized status of gay people and the relative comfort among the population for giving control of women’s rights to the EU. If the marginalized status of gay people influences support for the EU’s control of gay rights, I would not expect for this marginalized status to have a similar influence on support for EU control of women’s rights. The marginalized status of gay people should compel support for alternative authorities which address that particular marginalized group.

In Table 6, I replicate the models using support for EU control of women’s rights as the dependent variable (far right of the table). Neither feeling close to gay people nor thinking the equal treatment of gay people is personally important associated with support for the EU’s control of women’s rights. The interaction term Feeling close to gay people*Trust in the EU is negative and statistically insignificant. The coefficient is relatively small and does not represent a substantive effect. Those who trust the EU and those on the political left were more likely to support EU control of women’s rights. These results suggest that association with gay people has a specific effect on support for EU control of gay rights policies. Feeling close to gay people has a more specific effect on considerations of gay rights policies.

Table 6 Determinants of one’s likelihood to vote for a party that wants to give control of women’s rights to the EU
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Appendix 2: Tobit Model and Additional Controls

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Effects on one’s likelihood to vote for a party that wants to give control of rights to the EU: Tobit models
Full size table
Table 8 Effects on one’s likelihood to vote for a party that wants to give control of gay rights to the EU, with additional controls
Full size table

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Page, D. When Do Voters Support the European Union’s Involvement in Gay Rights?. Polit Behav 40, 103–126 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9396-6

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