Gays go Green? Voting Behaviour of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals in the 2021 German Federal Election

In recent years, there has been a growing literature on what Hertzog (1996) called the sexuality gap in politics and voting behavior in the US. Studies have shown that Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals (LGB*) tend to be more liberal and to vote more often for liberal and left parties. While the measurements reproduce such a gap for Canada (Perrella et al. 2012) or the UK (Turnbull-Dugarte et al. 2020), up to today, no such analysis has been conducted for the German case. Moreover, most of the measurements for European countries rely on data from the European Social Survey (ESS), which does not provide a direct measurement of an individual’s sexuality, instead only asking a question on the partner’s sex. This is problematic as it makes Bisexuals that live in opposite-sex partnerships invisible. As Western societies have become increasingly liberalised, sexual minorities - to the extent that such factors are captured in surveys - are also becoming more visible. For example, a recent study by Strode and Flores (2021) shows that 7.9 per cent of respondents in a US election poll identified themselves as LGB, making them a non-negligible group in election analyses. The present contribution makes several innovations in this respect. The data used for this article were collected through an online access panel in the run-up to the 2021 federal election, in which respondents were explicitly asked about their sexual orientation. Among the 2.144 eligible voters thus recorded, 9.79 per cent (n=210) identify as LGB and 90.21 per cent (n=1934) as heterosexual, making LGB a visible and identifiable voter group than can be compared to their heterosexual peers. Making use of Average Marginal Effects models, I can demonstrate that sexual identity is also important in shaping electoral behavior in Germany. For example, the probability of voting for the AfD, a party of the radical right, increases by 3.65% if an individual identifies as LGB - a similar observation has already been made for the Netherlands (Spierings 2021). In addition, however, identification with the Greens also increases by 7.44% if an individual identifies as LGB. Subsequent path modelling shows further relationships that result from belonging to the LGB community - not only for the AfD and the Greens. This article makes an important contribution to a better understanding of the implications of factors in the voting behaviour of the German population that have so far been neglected in electoral research. * I use the terms “lesbian, gay and bisexual”, “LGB” and “gay” interchangeably.