Do Citizens Reward Homophobic Governments? Evidence from Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act

In 2023, Uganda adopted the “Anti-Homosexuality Act”, which prohibits all sexual relations between persons of the same sex. The law is one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the world, as it includes the possibility of the death penalty. While international criticism of the law has been massive, it has received widespread support among Ugandan constituents. This paper addresses whether these supportive attitudes make Ugandan citizens update their beliefs about the autocratic regime, in other words, whether the Ugandan government can effectively use the law as a legitimation strategy to secure autocratic rule. We conducted a survey experiment using face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 individuals in the greater Kampala metropolitan area in the summer of 2024. While all individuals received information about a fictive evaluation of the political system in Uganda; however, half were informed (in neutral language) about the government’s adoption of the Anti-Homosexuality Act. The respondents then answered questions about their satisfaction with government performance and their support for the political system. Our preliminary findings suggest gendered responses to the reform: women who were exposed to information about the law had more positive views about government performance than those who received no such information. Among men, by contrast, we did not see such a pattern. If anything, men who were informed about the law had more negative attitudes about government performance than other men. Our demand-side take on anti-LGBTQ+ politics contributes to interrelated literatures on citizens’ responses to elites’ instrumentalization of LGBTQ+ issues (see e.g. Turnbull-Dugarte and Ortega 2024) and on how different audiences respond to autocratic governments’ usage of gender and sexuality policies to legitimize their rule (see e.g. Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Bush, Donno and Zetterberg 2024).