LGBTIQ+ Politics in Italy: Insights from a novel survey

We will present the first results of an original large survey on a representative sample of the Italian electorate that will be carried out in the weeks immediately before the upcoming 2024 European elections. Our questionnaire was aptly designed to a) adequately operationalise and identify multiple gender and sexual orientation identities, hence being well-suited to provide an intersectional account; and b) gauge, for the first time, the attitudes of Italian voters on a large and diversified set of salient, real-world issues concerning gender and sexual minorities. Additional modules of our questionnaire extensively cover other substantively relevant aspects such as socio-demographic characteristics, economic conditions, democratic attitudes, political participation and preferences, and voting behaviour. This will allow for an in-depth exploration of the relationship between such dimensions and individual-level attitudes – either more supportive or discriminatory – on issues pertaining to gender and sexual minorities in this Western European, traditional, multiparty-competition context. Our original data collection will hence provide the most complete exploration of the configuration and determinants of Italian voters’ attitudes on LGBTIQ+ issues yet, potentially speaking to comparable socio-cultural and party-political contexts across the surrounding region. Lastly, we will further contextualise our results within the larger research project of which this survey is part. Indeed, whilst of course we anticipate the quota of LGBTIQ+ respondents in our sample to be relatively small – although far from irrelevant –, the presented survey will be subsequently complemented by a dedicated, post-electoral community-based survey in the summer of 2024, which will more specifically explore the political dimension of the Italian LGBTIQ+ community itself. The complementarity of these separate and distinct surveys will also provide us with an opportunity for methodological reflections about survey investigations concerning both LGBTIQ+ issues and this population itself.