Why This Question Matters
The European Union has advanced common standards on LGBT rights, but public commitment to those standards is often weak in newer members and EU aspirants. Douglas Page asks a practical question with political stakes: when will voters support transferring authority over gay-rights protections from national governments to the EU?
A New Angle: Identification Versus Distance
Existing studies have not directly compared people who identify with gay people (close social or emotional ties) to those who do not. Page argues that sexual-minority marginalization carried out or tolerated by state institutions—what he terms "political homophobia"—can push people who identify with gay people toward support for supranational alternatives to their own state’s authority.
Original Survey Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina
Using an original public-opinion survey in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Page measures respondents' closeness to gay people and their preferences about whether control over gay-rights policy should rest with national governments or the EU. The analysis finds that respondents who identify more closely with gay people are more likely to favor transferring control of gay-rights protection to the EU.
Cross-Country Comparison: Twenty-One EU Surveys
Page supplements the Bosnia results with analysis of twenty-one surveys from EU member states. Across these countries, the paper shows that in contexts with higher levels of political homophobia, respondents who report discrimination on the basis of sexuality express greater support for EU involvement in gay rights than similarly situated respondents in less homophobic contexts.
What This Reveals for Scholars and Policymakers
The findings suggest public backing for EU-level enforcement of LGBT standards is conditional: where state-level homophobia is pronounced, people who experience or empathize with sexuality-based discrimination are more willing to cede authority to the EU. That pattern helps explain variation in support for EU human-rights enforcement and informs debates about the limits of domestic legitimacy versus supranational remedies.
| When Do Voters Support the European Union's Involvement in Gay Rights? was authored by Douglas Page. It was published by Springer in Pol. Behav. in 2018. |
