Coming Out in National Probability Surveys: How Tolerance Shapes Outgroup Identification – The Case of LGBT People in the European Union

Social scientists from a wide variety of fields have shown a considerable and growing interest in studying the behavior and attitudes of minorities over the last decades. However, surveying minority populations has turned out to be a difficult endeavor as probability surveys often capture too few minority respondents for making precise inferences, whereas non-probability sampling techniques potentially yield biased results. The problem of biased estimates is exacerbated further when minority individuals can and feel a need to conceal their identity from researchers due to societal stigma. The following study makes use of four waves of Special Eurobarometer surveys on discrimination in the European Union conducted between 2009 and 2019. More precisely, I estimate a cross-lagged panel model to find out whether greater tolerance in a country increases the proportion of people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) in the surveys or whether a higher percentage of LGBTs leads to greater tolerance. I find evidence in favor of the former and not the later explanation. This finding has important consequences for the study of minorities, suggesting that researchers interested in the field should be wary of making comparative claims about the preferences and behavior of minorities as long as social stigma varies significantly between cases.