Pride and policy: A survey experiment to understand the influence of homosexuality on policy support

Abstract

How does the sexual orientation of a politician influence support for their policies? Literature suggests that overall, there is likely to be no effect, while among older, conservative, male individuals support for a policy proposed by a homosexual politician is smaller. Two main theories explain this phenomenon. First, reduced support among this subgroup could be due to the spillover of an individual’s attitudes towards homosexuals on the evaluation of the policy, called attitudinal spillover. Second, scholars emphasize the importance of emotions in the policy process that could be triggered by homosexual politicians. Neither has been tested for homosexual politicians which is due to the relatively recent interest in the study of homosexuality in politics and the scarcity of observational data. To close this gap in the literature, I conducted a vignette experiment embedded in an online survey that manipulates the sexual orientation of politicians in different policy fields. Results hint towards a positive bias in the evaluation of the homosexual politician's policy compared to his heterosexual counterpart although this does not prove to be statistically significant. This study contributes to the understanding of biases in the policy evaluation process and bears important insights in understanding inequalities in political representation.