Green (inclusive) nationalists: LGBT+ voters in the Scottish multiparty space

Recent empirical research has emerged that highlights the divergent political preferences between sexual minority individuals in Europe and their heterosexual peers. This, still novel, catalogue of work argues that lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters are significantly more inclined to vote for left-wing parties than parties on the centre-right. Theoretically this divergence is assumed to be a function of, amongst other determinants, left wing parties’ catering of the policy preferences sought by sexual minority individuals. Given the infancy of this scholarship, a number of gaps remain. On the one hand, comparative evidence relies on indirect measurement strategies that do not consider single individuals. And these measurement approaches do not allow for the identification of transgender (T) individuals who make up an important part of the LGBT+ community. On the other hand, much of the evidence we have comes from two-party systems where binary conflict between partisan alternatives incentivises LGBT voters to coalesce behind a single political party. In this paper we seek to remedy some of the gaps. Relying on original data from the Scottish Election Study that employs direct measures of both sexuality and (trans) gender identity, we analyse how LGBT+ voters coalesce around political parties within Scotland’s multi-party system. The Scottish case is of theoretical interest when it comes to understanding LGBT political behaviour for a number of reasons. First, it represents a multi-party as opposed to two-party system meaning that the LGBT “lavender vote” may be distributed across more than one of the numerous, socially liberal party alternatives. Second, it is a country case where the traditional left-liberal vs right-conservative cleavage structure is also accompanied by a salient territorial cleavage over, simultaneously, Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom as well as Scotland’s membership of the European Union.