A new study out of Northwestern University in Chicago asserts that gay candidates are receiving more support than ever from voters, shedding the “electoral penalty” of being gay in ever greater numbers.
At the same time, voters are imposing another penalty on candidates for gender presentation: male candidates, gay and straight, who don’t conform to traditional gender expectations — those who may look or sound feminine, for example — take a hit in voter acceptance.
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“On the left, the bias against gay candidates has moved from ‘don’t be gay’ to ‘don’t look or sound gay,’” Martin Naunov, an assistant professor of political science and a faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, told Northwestern Now. His paper was published recently in the Journal of Politics.
“Voters across the political spectrum, including those who think of themselves as allies, still show bias against candidates who look or sound even slightly gender nonconforming — a key cultural marker of gayness,” Naunov said. “This has real consequences for who gets elected and represented in public life.”
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Naunov uncovered those “persisting biases” through a novel experiment deploying “visual and audio stimuli” to manipulate the sexuality and gender presentation of male political candidates.
In two survey experiments sent to 1,971 U.S. adults and 616 university students, participants were asked to evaluate hypothetical candidates for Congress from their own party, and rate how likely they’d be to vote for each. The profiles featured a headshot and a short audio campaign message from the candidate.
Naunov signaled the candidates’ sexual orientation with references to their “husband” or “wife,” and manipulated both the photo and audio clip to masculinize or feminize the candidate. The researcher used a sample of 157 gay candidates endorsed by the Victory Fund to set “real-life” parameters on the range of manipulation.
The findings were surprising, Naunov said.
“What surprised me most was that Democrats punished gender nonconformity at roughly the same rate as Republicans,” he said.
Among all voters, identifying as gay dropped a candidate’s probability of support by seven points. A gender nonconforming appearance dropped a gay candidate’s support by another seven points. Both Democrats and Republicans penalize gender nonconformity at the same rate.
Maybe the most thought-provoking finding was that the gender nonconformity penalty applies to both gay and straight men. A straight man who looks or sounds gender nonconforming also pays an electoral cost, Naunov found.
“We used to refuse to elect gay people. Now we elect them, but so long as they conform to a very particular version of masculinity,” Naunov said.
But the study also shows that “straight men who deviate even slightly from norms of masculinity get punished electorally, too,” he said.
“Recognizing this matters, because it points to something that often gets lost in conversations about LGBTQ rights: traditional beliefs about how a person should look, sound and move in the world may privilege heterosexuality, but they also diminish the freedom and authenticity of everyone, including straight people.”
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