Internalising new European Norms: Transnational Advocacy, Public Opinion, and the Politicisation of LGBT Rights

Why have societal attitudes towards lesbian and gay people changed differently across European states? Are these changes due to heightened exposure to EU norms and institutions? Under what domestic and transnational preconditions do international norms on sexual minority rights successfully diffuse to new member states? I address these questions using public opinion data on the 27 EU member states from 1990 to 2009, combined with original data on the network of transnational LGBT advocacy groups. Multilevel random intercept models help to explain the state’s contextual influence over individual attitudes towards homosexuality across three points in time, as well as the differences in societal attitudes across states. I argue that attitudinal change among individuals—nested both in societies and social groupings within the state—depends on the degree to which their societies are connected to the international community via channels of visibility. Furthermore, such change depends also on the perceptions of perceived threat that individuals’ social groups associate with the norm. Within the domestic sphere, social groups that are more religious and more nationalist should perceive LGBT norms as more threatening, based on the assumption that LGBT rights challenge national identity and tradition. In this sense, threat perceptions moderate the effectiveness of transnational channels and the diffusion of international norms to individuals. The paper begins by surveying existing explanations for attitudinal change. From this baseline, I build my theoretical propositions for explaining the variation recognized across individuals and elaborate on how I expect visibility and threat perception to function in this process. The findings explain the roles of visibility and threat perception in predicting tolerance among individuals, as well as how threat perception moderates the effect of visibility; describing differences between process and outcome in EU-12 and EU-15 states.