11:20 - 13:00
P7-S170
Room: 0A.02
Chair/s:
Mary Stegmaier
Discussant/s:
Gonzalo Di Landro
Sister, where is your sickle? Social class in the political behavior of LGBTQ+ individuals
P7-S170-2
Presented by: Joel Canto Roche
Joel Canto Roche
University of Toronto
Literature on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ+) political behavior has scarcely engaged the relevance of social class. Accordingly, LGBTQ+ subjects are generally presented to act as a monolithic group regardless of objective or subjective class measurements. Not only this, but it assumes that class explanatory power is equal across LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ voters. Overall, the contemporary consensus embraces LGBTQ+ subjects as intrinsically liberal, middle class and cosmopolitan at face value, thus neglecting how class immanence affects the constitution of sexual and gender identities as the symbolic and engenders differential material interests within the community. In other words, the prevalent literature construes LGBTIQ+ as a political monolith prey to electoral capture by liberal elites. This paper introduces a new way to understand LGBTQ+ political behavior in majority systems, combining the supply and the demand side. On the one hand, we propose that working class LGBTQ+ subjects will be more likely than working class non-LGBTQ+ subjects to support social-democratic and liberal parties and engage in political participation due to linked fate. On the other hand, working class LGBTQ+ subjects will be more likely than affluent LGBTQ+ subjects to support more radical options on the left, materially and symbolically. We empirically assess these relations using existing datasets in the United States and Canada in conjunction with a novel LGBTQ+ dataset from the United Kingdom.
Keywords: LGBTQ; Social class; Political Behavior.

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