No Evidence of Backlash: LGBT Rights in Latin America

Lucas De abreu maia, Albert Chiu, Scott Desposato

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
230 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Since the civil rights movement, scholars have warned that prominority policies can create a backlash effect in the majority. Some observers fear these dynamics may be at work in Latin America, where after dramatic advances in LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights, voters have elected antigay leaders. To investigate, we created the Latin American Rainbow Index—a measure of LGBT rights in the continent by country—and combined it with individual survey responses to test whether granting new rights had any discernible impact on attitudes. We find no evidence of backlash and little evidence of polarization. We also provide a new index of LGBT rights in the continent, which may be used by other scholars to further examine the LGBT movement in Latin America.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)49-63
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Politics
Volume85
Issue number1
Early online date2 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Lucas de Abreu Maia thanks the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, which partially funded this research via the Co-authorship Grant. Replication files are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). The empirical analysis has been successfully replicated by the JOP replication analyst. An appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/720940. 1. Others have also noted this apparent paradox. See, e.g., Corrales (2017, 2020) and Smith and Boas (2020).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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