Suchergebnisse

Using the formation of a lesbian and gay electoral constituency as a case, this article demonstrates how activists and party elites contest and construct collective identities and groups. Activist–party interactions produce identity-building feedback that recognizes some groups and identities and rejects others, creating conditions for people to see themselves as partisans. I call this process "constitutive group mobilization." I find that, when party actors affirmed civil rights and libertarian constructions of lesbian and gay people and politics, mobilization was relatively bipartisan. Republicans' emerging alliance with the Christian Right, however, brought activists to form the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Democratic Clubs, crystallizing civil rights as the dominant linkage to partisanship. These developments reveal how groups and identities form endogenously to parties rather than entering the party system as preformed entities with fixed interests and partisanship. Thus, the lesbian and gay case provides insights about group and identity formation previously overlooked in party and LGBT politics scholarship.

Theories of out-group hostility have long held that attitudes about marginalized groups are important predictors of policy support. These theories, however, have mostly examined the attitudes of white people and sexual orientation has rarely been a category of analysis. Thus, we know less about whether these theories are conditional on group position in racial and sexual hierarchies. This paper argues that processes of marginalization shape out-group hostility. Using comparative relational analysis, I examine support for pro-minority policies among white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people, straight people of color and whites. I find that ethnocentrism is not a general predictor of out-group hostility among the members of marginalized groups. Alternatively, group-targeted homophobia, racism, and nativism predict opposition to pro-minority policies, but the members of marginalized groups have more egalitarian attitudes overall. These findings challenge long-held conventional wisdoms about prejudice, underscoring the importance of centering on marginalized groups in public opinion.

"LGBT People as a Relatively Politically Powerless Group" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractUsing a national audit of mayors in the United States, this paper examines responsiveness to Latine lesbian and gay constituents who request that their city issue an LGBTQ pride proclamation. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, descriptive representation, and political institutions, we articulate the conditions under which mayors are responsive to public-facing constituency service requests to issue LGBTQ pride proclamations. We find that mayors are more responsive to requests from lesbian couples than gay couples. In addition, baseline responsiveness to our inquiry was influenced by mayors' identity characteristics. LGBTQ mayors were more likely to respond than non-LGBTQ mayors, but Latine mayors were less likely to respond than non-Latine mayors. In addition, mayors who represent cities where nondiscrimination ordinances protect LGBT people from discrimination were more responsive than mayors who represent cities where LGBT people are not protected from discrimination. These findings demonstrate how intersectional frameworks can advance audit experiments and that shared descriptive characteristics do not inevitably translate into responsiveness, a common assumption in single-axis studies of representation.

AbstractMarriage rights were extended to same‐sex couples in the United States in 2015. However, anecdotes of bureaucratic noncompliance (in the form of bias or denial of license issuance) raise the possibility that de jure marriage equality has not led to equality in practice. We investigate this by conducting a nationwide audit experiment of local‐level marriage license–granting officials in the United States. These officials vary in the constituencies they serve, as well as how they are selected, allowing us to evaluate long‐standing hypotheses about bureaucratic responsiveness. Overall, we find no evidence of systematic discrimination against same‐sex couples—regardless of responsiveness measure, institutions, ideology, or prior state legal history. We find, however, that among same‐sex couples, officials tended to be more responsive to lesbian couples. In contrast to evidence in other areas of service provision, such as policing and federal assistance programs, we find bureaucrats tasked with provision of marriage services show little evidence of discrimination.

The online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular source of respondents for social science research. A growing body of research has examined the demographic composition of MTurk workers as compared with that of other populations. While these comparisons have revealed the ways in which MTurk workers are and are not representative of the general population, variations among samples drawn from MTurk have received less attention. This article focuses on whether MTurk sample composition varies as a function of time. Specifically, we examine whether demographic characteristics vary by (a) time of day, (b) day of week, and serial position (i.e., earlier or later in data collection), both (c) across the entire data collection and (d) within specific batches. We find that day of week differences are minimal, but that time of day and serial position are associated with small but important variations in demographic composition. This demonstrates that MTurk samples cannot be presumed identical across different studies, potentially affecting reliability, validity, and efforts to reproduce findings.