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Abstract

Individuals who participate more in politics tend to be better represented politically. As a result, it is important to examine which groups are more and which groups are less likely to participate. In this paper, we study the institutional and non-institutional political participation of an important group that has only received scant attention in the literature: sexual minorities. To do so, we leverage recent datasets and conduct the first comprehensive study on the relationship between sexual orientation and non-electoral political participation in Canada. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, the analyses reveal that sexual minorities (n = 2061) participate to a greater extent in politics compared to heterosexuals (n = 23,652), even after controlling for numerous socioeconomic factors. We also find that the sexuality gap is similar across gender identities. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the comparative literature on sexuality and politics.

Keywords

Non-electoral political participation sexual orientation sexual minorities democracy

Citizens’ political participation is key for the quality of a democratic regime (e.g., Lijphart, 1997). As a result, a large body of literature examines the determinants and correlates of participation, primarily focusing on electoral participation (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980). However, examining non-electoral political participation is equally important for gaining a comprehensive understanding of political behavior and civic engagement in a society (see Marien et al., 2010). Non-electoral participation, which includes both institutionalized (e.g., holding a membership of a political party) and non-institutionalized forms of participation (e.g., participating in a protest), plays a key role in the functioning of representative democracies (Hooghe and Marien, 2014; Oser, 2022). Notably, many social and political changes are driven by grassroots movements and advocacy efforts, in which non-electoral political participation often plays a pivotal role (Wasow, 2020). Studying the characteristics of those who participate in non-electoral forms of participation therefore helps researchers and policymakers understand the dynamics of social change. Moreover, political engagement serves as a means to express preferences and many indications suggest that such forms of participation can strengthen representation by drawing politicians’ attention to citizens’ needs and concerns (see Rasmussen and Reher, 2019).

While extensive research has investigated different types of non-electoral political participation, along with their correlates, causes, and consequences across diverse contexts (e.g., Giugni and Grasso, 2022), our study focuses on a sociodemographic factor that has received minimal attention: sexual orientation. Specifically, we examine whether sexual minorities¹ engage to a greater extent in various forms of non-electoral political participation compared to heterosexuals. Theoretical models, as we review, suggest that they should, as sexual minorities, participate like “their rights depend on it.” We believe that it is important to improve our understanding of the role of sexual identity for political engagement, especially considering the increasing proportion of citizens who identify as sexual minorities in many societies.

In this research, we provide the first fine-grained analyses of the relationship between sexual orientation and non-electoral political participation in Canada. To do so, we leverage large datasets that provide a substantial amount of variance in terms of respondents’ sexual orientation (i.e., n = 2,061 sexual minorities and 23,652 heterosexuals). Our findings show that sexual minorities are overall more engaged in politics and participate to a greater extent through various non-electoral actions. This holds true across gender identities. However, the strength of the association varies greatly across different types of non-electoral participation. That is, the positive relationship between self-identification as a sexual minority and political participation is rather small for institutionalized non-electoral participation, but much larger for non-institutionalized non-electoral participation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.

Sexual orientation and political engagement

A substantial body of literature has investigated patterns of political participation through voting, revealing that citizens’ proclivity to turn out to vote varies across different social groups (Lijphart, 1997; Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980). These inequalities have important implications for democracy as they can lead to inequalities in representation (Blais et al., 2020; Dassonneville et al., 2021; Griffin and Newman, 2005). The literature on electoral participation has mainly focused on important sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics such as age, education, sex, race, and economic well-being (e.g., Smets and Van Ham, 2013). Surprisingly, however, few studies have examined the link between sexual orientation and political participation, despite the increasing interest in the political behavior of sexual minorities (e.g., Page et al., 2022; Page and Paulin, 2022). Moreover, most work on the political participation of sexual minorities has focused on a single case: the United States. In this research, we argue that it is important to improve our understanding of sexual minorities’ level of engagement in politics beyond voting and in other contexts than the United States. Indeed, as for electoral participation, there is a risk that unequal levels of non-electoral political participation lead to inequalities in how well individuals are represented (Leighley and Oser, 2018).

From studies that have examined the connection between sexual orientation and political engagement, we can discern two broad mechanisms to explain the participation of sexual minorities: the “selection mechanism” and the “mobilization mechanism” (Cravens III, 2021). First, the selection mechanism asserts that self-identifying as a sexual minority is closely linked to other sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics that impact political engagement (Cravens III, 2020; Strode and Flores, 2021). It suggests that sexual minorities’ political behavior can be explained by these other sociodemographic characteristics rather than by sexual orientation itself. That is, once these sociodemographic characteristics are considered, any disparities in participation—either higher or lower—between sexual minorities and heterosexuals should disappear. It is important to note that the selection mechanism does not, per se, lead to a clear expectation regarding the level of political participation of sexual minorities. For instance, in Canada, almost one third of LGBTQ2+ Canadians are under 25 years old, sexual minorities are also less wealthy on average and twice as likely to have experienced some types of homelessness (Statistics Canada, 2023). Given that these factors (younger age and fewer financial resources) are associated with lower levels of political engagement, they might explain why sexual minorities are less politically active. Still following the selection mechanism, one might predict higher levels of political engagement among sexual minorities if, as shown by Lewis et al. (2011) for the US context, sexual minorities are better educated on average than heterosexuals. Overall, the selection mechanism implies that differences in political participation could be driven by other sociodemographic or socioeconomic characteristics of individuals who identify as sexual minorities.

Second, the mobilization mechanism stipulates that the association between identifying as a sexual minority and participation is not spurious but results from the fact that sexual minorities are more mobilized than heterosexuals. This mechanism predicts that sexual minorities will display greater levels of political participation. The literature has drawn attention to different factors that lead sexual minorities to become more politically mobilized, but the key rationale is that sexual minorities are a marginalized minority group that suffers from social and state-sponsored discrimination and thus have more incentives to get involved in politics (Turnbull-Dugarte and Townsley, 2020). This line of reasoning is consistent with scholarship on lived discrimination among ethnic minorities.² Among other things, state-sponsored discrimination against sexual minorities legitimizes homophobia within society through fostering political efficacy among homophobic individuals. This not only leads to a higher turnout of intolerant individuals, thus reinforcing the political stigma against sexual minorities, but can also suppress non-electoral participation among tolerant individuals, who normally tend to have higher levels of non-political engagement (Page et al., 2022). In other words, sexual minorities would “vote like their rights depend on it” and engage in various forms of political participation to extend or solidify their rights.

Cravens III (2021) offers support for the mobilization mechanism, by showing that experiencing heterosexist stigma is associated with a greater tendency to vote among sexual minorities in both primary and general elections in the United States. Swank and Fahs (2013a) also find a positive association between levels of discrimination and political engagement among LGB respondents even after controlling for various demographic variables (i.e., taking into account the selection mechanism). Very few studies outside of the U.S. examine the link between citizens’ sexual orientation and non-electoral political participation. First, Turnbull-Dugarte and Townsley (2020) show that in Europe, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals participate more in politics compared to heterosexuals. Second, Page (2018) also shows that sexual minorities who experience discrimination can be more mobilized, but only in some contexts. The author argues that sexual minorities will be more mobilized in contexts with stronger political opportunity structure and finds evidence of this expectation by showing that sexual minorities participate to a greater extent in politics in Western Europe but not in Eastern Europe.

Overall, the literature suggests that sexual minorities will display higher levels of non-electoral political participation compared to heterosexuals (hypothesis 1).

Methodology

Case study

To test our hypothesis, we focus on the Canadian case. Despite some work on sexuality and vote choice (e.g., Guntermann and Beauvais, 2022; Tremblay, 2022), we know very little when it comes to the political participation of sexual minorities in the Canadian context. As far as we know, only two previous studies have quantitatively examined the relationship between sexual orientation and political engagement in Canada. First, Perrella et al. (2019) pooled data from 2008 to 2013, and found that sexual minorities, compared to heterosexuals, displayed higher levels of non-electoral political participation. The gap in non-electoral participation found by Perella et al. (2019) is about 0.11 points on a 0-10 scale—a substantively small effect. Second, Çakır et al. (2024) used data from election studies conducted between 2019 and 2023 to assess differences in electoral participation between sexual minorities and heterosexuals. The authors found that sexual minorities were more likely to vote than heterosexuals. While both studies show evidence that is in line with the mobilization mechanism, only Perella et al. (2019) provide insights into the non-electoral participation of sexual minorities. That said, the authors only consider a general indicator of non-electoral participation, leaving open the question what forms of non-electoral participation sexual minorities are particularly active in.

Canada is particularly interesting given the literature showing that sexual minorities participate more in politics in contexts with a more favorable political opportunity structure (Page 2018). Indeed, Canada is considered as one of the most progressive countries regarding the rights of sexual minorities. This context is strongly linked to the adoption of the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 which allowed sexual minorities to challenge state-sponsored discriminations against sexual minorities (Tremblay 2022: 14). Hence, the scope conditions under which the mobilization thesis should apply are likely to be met in Canada.

Data and indicators

According to Perrella et al. (2012), the dearth of research on sexual minorities and political engagement reflects a lack of adequate survey data as they generally do not include a sufficient number of respondents who identify as sexual minorities, or they lack good indicators of political participation. In this research, we overcome these limitations by using all C-Dem’s currently available datasets that include the sexual orientation question. That is, we combine the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Study as well as seven provincial election studies (see Appendix A for more information and references on the datasets). For every election study, C-Dem conducted a pre- and post-election survey. The number of observations vary greatly across the election studies, but the sample constitutes a quota-based representative sample of the pool of voters in a given election. We apply C-Dem’s post-electoral weights for sociodemographic variables. Overall, 25,713 respondents provided valid information to all the indicators required for our analyses (see Table A1 in Appendix A for the breakdown by surveys).

To measure sexual orientation, respondents were asked (in the pre-election survey) how they defined their sexual orientation.³ There is some variation in the answer choices between surveys, but the 2021 Canadian Election Study, which includes most observations, offered the following answer options: “Straight or heterosexual,” “Gay or lesbian,” “Bisexual,” “Queer,” “Something else” and “I am not sure yet.”⁴ Based on this question, we generate a 4-category variable distinguishing “Heterosexual,” “Gay or Lesbian,” “Bisexual,” and “Other” (which includes “Queer,” “Something else,” “I am not sure yet,” and “Other”). All respondents refusing to answer and choosing “Don’t know” are excluded from the analyses. Table 1 presents the distribution of the sexual orientation variable in the data. Overall, out of the 25,713 respondents, just over 90% identify as heterosexual while over 2000 identify as a sexual minority (gay/lesbian, bisexual or other).

Table 1.

Main Sexual Orientations, C-Dem’s Datasets.

Sexual orientation	Total
Heterosexual	n = 23,443 91.2%
Gay/lesbian	n = 1024 4.0%
Bisexual	n = 942 3.7%
Other	n = 304 1.2%
Total	25,713

Note: C-Dem’s weights are applied.

To measure non-electoral participation, we follow a common approach in the study of political participation and distinguish between institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of participation (e.g., Marien et al., 2010; Oser, 2022). The former refers to activities that are electoral-oriented and related to institutions, while the latter encompasses various actions that go beyond the electoral arena and traditional political channels.⁵ The surveys include 10 items of non-electoral political participation for which respondents indicated the extent to which they engaged in these political acts in the past 12 months. The answer choices were “Never,” “Just once,” “A few times,” “More than five times,” and “Don’t know/Prefer not to answer.” The don’t knows and refusals were excluded. We rescaled every answer as a continuous variable ranging from 0 to 1, where “never” was coded 0 and “More than five times” was coded 1. Finally, the surveys asked respondents whether they have ever been a member of a political party. Respondents were coded 0 if they answered no and 1 if they answered yes. Table 2 shows which item is included in each index.⁶

Table 2.

Indicators of Non-electoral Political Participation.

Type of non-electoral participation	Items
Institutionalized participation	Attended a political meeting or speech
	Followed any elected officials or candidates for office on social media
	Volunteered for a political party or candidate
	Contacted an elected representative (federal, provincial or local/municipal)
	Donated money to a political candidate or party
	Member of a political party
Non-institutionalized participation	Attended a rally or participated in a protest or demonstration
	Boycotted or bought products for ethical, environmental, or political reasons
	Signed a petition in person or online
	Circulated, (re)posted or commented on political information, news or content online or offline
	Used social media to discuss politics or political issues

We combined the items, each ranging from 0 to 1, to generate two indices, which we then rescaled to range between 0 and 1. Both indices displayed a Chronbach’s α of 0.74. Figure 1 below shows the distributions of the two indicators. The average for institutionalized participation is .15 (std. deviation = 0.19), while for non-institutionalized participation, it is 0.24 (std. deviation = 0.24). Our main estimation strategy relies on Ordinary Least Squares regressions predicting institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation, controlling for respondents’ age, gender identity, education, economic well-being, size of the city or town they live in and language. Additionally, we include election fixed effects. Appendix C provides more details on question wordings and information about the coding of all variables. Descriptive statistics for all variables are shown in Appendix B.⁷

Figure 1.

Distributions of non-electoral participation.

Findings

We estimate separate OLS regressions predicting respondents’ scores on both indices, each ranging between 0 and 1. Figure 2 shows the OLS coefficients of interests (i.e., self-identifying as a sexual minority compared to heterosexuals) and Figure 3 shows the predicted values on both dependent variables. All six coefficients are positive, indicating that the predicted level of institutionalized political participation as well as the level of non-institutionalized participation is higher for all sexual minorities than it is for heterosexuals. All the effects are statistically significant at p < 0.5. However, there is a great deal of heterogeneity regarding the effects for different types of non-electoral participation as well as across sexual orientations.

Figure 2.

Sexual orientation (compared to heterosexual) and participation indices. Note: Full estimates are shown in Table D1 in Appendix D. 95% confidence intervals are included.

Figure 3.

Predicted levels of political participation across sexual orientations. Note: Full estimates are shown in Table D1 in Appendix D. 95% confidence intervals are included.

For the institutionalized forms of political participation, the positive effects are statistically significant but substantively small. They range from 0.02 (gay/lesbian) to about 0.04 (other) when compared to heterosexuals. The estimates are larger for non-institutionalized participation and there is more variation in the effect sizes between groups for non-institutionalized participation.

The coefficients for non-institutionalized participation (squares in Figure 2) suggest an effect of 0.05 for gays/lesbians, 0.11 for bisexuals, and 0.17 for respondents who self-identify as neither heterosexual, gay/lesbian, nor bisexual. These estimates, in particular those for the “bisexual” and “other” categories, are very large. Overall, being a sexual minority in Canada is associated with greater levels of engagement in non-electoral politics, but the positive association is small when it comes to institutionalized forms of participation and very large when it comes to non-institutionalized forms of participation.

This effect does not seem to be attributed to specific methodological choices as whether we include more or less control variables does not affect the coefficients (see Appendix F) and using a Poisson model instead of OLS regression (considering the skewed distributions, see Figure 1) leads to almost identical associations—see Figure G1 in Appendix G.

Based on the regressions in Table D1, we note that men participate more in both forms of political participation. The same applies to respondents with a university degree as well as wealthier respondents. French-speaking respondents tend to participate to a lesser extent in politics. These relationships are broadly consistent with the literature (Blais and Daoust 2020). The relationship between age and political participation as well as rural/urban differences are less straightforward to interpret as their effects vary depending on the form of political participation that is analyzed.

Finally, as research on sexuality and political participation has shown moderation effects from citizens’ gender identity (Swank and Fahs, 2013b), we also seek to unpack our findings across gender identities. We estimate the average marginal effects of self-identifying as a sexual minority on the two types of non-electoral participation across genders by adding an interaction term to the regression model (see Table D2 in Appendix D). Figure 4 presents the AMEs and Figure H1 of the appendix shows the predicted levels of political participation across sexual orientations and gender. Overall, the six set of comparisons are very similar, with one exception. Specifically, the effect of self-identifying as bisexual is substantially different (p < 0.05) between women and men when it comes to non-institutionalized political participation. While this heterogenous effect is interesting, the big picture is that there is no systematic moderation effect from gender.

Figure 4.

Moderation effects of gender identity. Note: Full estimates are shown in Table D2 in Appendix D. 95% confidence intervals are included.

Discussion and implications

Studying who participates in politics is key and, in this research, we have aimed at integrating an overlooked correlate of participation: sexual orientation. Previous research suggests that sexual minorities participate more in politics. Our findings are in line with this prediction. Moreover, our findings are very unlikely to be driven by the selection mechanism: indeed, we control for various sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors in our analyses, and in fact, the bivariate associations between sexual orientation and participation are very similar to the estimates in Figure 2 (see Figure F1 in Appendix F). This implies that Canadian sexual minorities participate more in politics not because of their sociodemographic background, but because they are more mobilized.

We also uncovered important heterogenous effects of sexuality on non-electoral participation. The positive association between being a sexual minority and participation is much stronger for non-institutionalized political participation than for institutionalized non-electoral forms of political participation. We cannot directly test the reasons behind this phenomenon, but one plausible explanation is that Canadian sexual minorities have endured discrimination, including state-sponsored discrimination, and faced a favorable context regarding the political opportunity structure (see Page 2018). Moreover, we find a lot of heterogeneity in the association between sexuality and political participation within sexual minorities. For non-institutionalized political participation, the coefficient is much larger for bisexuals compared to heterosexuals, and the coefficient for “others” is much larger than the one for bisexuals. The literature should strive to better unpack the “others” category (queer, asexual, etc.). Future research should also seek to explain why sexual minorities seem to participate more in politics, and test whether this mobilization is caused by higher degrees of prejudice.

Overall, we believe that our findings are quite reassuring news for democracy. Indeed, sexual minorities face numerous prejudice and discrimination, even nowadays, and things would likely be worse if they were politically disengaged—but they aren’t.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Do sexual minorities participate more in politics?

Supplemental Material for Do sexual minorities participate more in politics? by Jean-François Daoust, Semih Çakır, Ruth Dassonneville and Mélyann Guévremont in Research and Politics

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Replication files

The replication files are publicly accessible on Harvard Dataverse:

ORCID iDs

Jean-Francois Daoust

Semih Çakır

Ruth Dassonneville

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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