Can Candidate Diversity Enhance LGBTQ+ Voter Engagement and Participation in Canadian Politics?

Political actors, academics, and civil society organizations have long recognized the importance of diversity in political decision-making bodies for policy outputs, elite representation, and democratic legitimacy. However, little attention has focused on the symbolic impact that diverse candidates’ identities might have on minority voters who share those identities. While recent research suggests that LGBTQ+ voters are unlike other social minorities in that they are more likely to be actively engaged in the political process (Bowers & Whitley 2020; Moreau et al. 2019; Turnbull-Dugarte & Townsley 2020), there is still much to learn about what motivates them. This is particularly the case in countries with multi-party systems or where parties are not as polarized around LGBTQ+ rights as they are in the US and partisanship may not be as strong of a motivating factor (Egan 2012; Hertzog 1996; Lewis et al. 2011; Turnbull-Dugarte 2020a,b,c). We anticipate that having LGBTQ+ role models who are running for office may be an important empowering factor that increases an already relatively high level of political engagement. More specifically, this paper seeks to understand the impact that political role models have on LGBTQ+ voter engagement. It does this by focusing on LGBTQ+ voters located in those ridings that have LGBTQ+ candidates and comparing them to LGBTQ+ voters in ridings with no such candidates. In other words, we ask the following question: To what degree do voters, who see candidates with whom they share their identities as LGBTQ+ individuals, feel more politically empowered and likewise less disengaged by these political role models in comparison to those voters without such local role models? This project explores this candidate/voter affinity by incorporating information about the 150 LGBTQ+ candidates who ran in the 2019 (81) and 2021 (69) federal elections in Canada into the survey results of the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies (CES). These election studies included identifiers of the ridings in which each respondent is located as well as questions about respondents’ sexual orientation. This will enable us to correlate the responses of LGBTQ+ voters in ridings with LGBTQ+ candidates and compare them to responses of LGBTQ+ voters who do not have these candidates to choose from. This permits us to explore the manner in which potential affinities have an impact on voters’ levels of political efficacy, interest, engagement, and participation as measured in the election study. More importantly, we will be able to develop a better understanding of how the intersectional identities of gender identity, Indigeneity, and racialized status are triggered and affect political engagement of different LGBTQ+ voters when they are presented with candidates who share these multiple identities.