In this post, Phillip Ayoub (PA), Douglas Page (DP), and Sam Whitt (SW) discuss their APSR article, “Pride amid Prejudice: The Influence of LGBT+ Activism in a Socially Conservative Society.”

APSR: Could you tell us a little bit about the paper in general–where the idea came from and your goals?

PA: For us, the inspiration was both theoretical and empirical. First, the question of “What are the outcomes of Prides?” was motivated in part by conversations that we’d followed in the contentious politics field. A few recent reviews of the field highlighted a central challenge for contentious politics scholarship, which involves isolating the effects of social movement performances on opinion and behavioral change, arguing that the field has devoted little systematic effort to accounting for the impact of advocacy on the communities in which it takes place.

That was one central motivation, coupled with an ongoing debate in the LGBTQ scholarship about the meaning and significance of Pride as a social movement performance. Some scholars see Pride as front and center as the most visible mobilization that allows people to live out their identities more than before, because these Pride parades are seen to be able to respond to opponent groups, to sustain mobilization, but also―through a mechanism of contact―as able to capture hearts and minds.

Yet there’s a more critical scholarship that has noted that Prides can also be insensitive to cultural context, in part because they’re associated with the West and deemed as “foreign” in many other contexts; and also that they might be able to provoke resistance and violence towards LGBTQ people. So, with these debates in mind, we drew mechanisms from both camps to theorize how Prides might be effective, and we theorized that they could be interactive, that they could operate in different ways across geography and social group. Pulling mechanisms from both camps formed our own argument that Prides may well work under the right conditions, but they require interaction via proximity and contact, and that varies across space.

APSR: In your piece, you laid out two potential mechanisms that might cause changes in attitudes: a “contact effect,” which might reduce anti-LGBT attitudes, or a “backlash effect,” which might increase them. What did you find, and were you surprised by the results?

SW: Bosnia is an interesting case because, in Europe, it’s an outlier in terms of high levels of anti-LGBT attitudes―but Bosnia looks quite comparable to many places outside of Europe. So for us it was really compelling to think about which way Pride would go. One possibility was that Pride could amplify support for LGBT rights, and Pride organizers clearly picked Sarajevo strategically because they thought it would be welcoming to Pride. On the other hand, we’ve seen backlash against Prides in the Balkan region (ex. Serbia), and we knew that from prior survey data that Bosnia was a tough case. So we thought we would find evidence of both support and opposition. For some people, Pride would have a mobilizing effect. And we found that. But we also knew we would find counter-mobilization, especially among people who were highly ethno-nationalistic and religious because conflict tends to increase ethno-nationalism and religiosity in ways that could disadvantage Pride. In terms of mechanisms for Pride support, I think that the critical mechanism that we examine comes through visibility and contact with people at Pride. Inside Sarajevo, people had the opportunity to engage and they could not ignore away Pride that was happening around them. The Pride effects that we observe in Sarajevo were generally positive. However, outside Sarajevo, where there was no clear contact or visibility of Pride marchers, Pride didn’t have much of an impact.

DP: I can chime in more about the case. Bosnian activists announced Pride in the Spring of 2019, so we saw this as this opportunity to examine the effects of the new Pride on the community where it takes place. And like Sam was saying, Bosnia’s a socially conservative case. If we look at the recent wave of the World Values Survey, we see that it’s arguably the third most conservative country in Europe regarding tolerance of homosexuality, behind Armenia and Georgia. In the past other LGBT events in Bosnia have faced protests and attacks, but the Pride organizers saw these factors as motivations to mobilize and raise support and awareness. Pride took place on September 8th, 2019, with 3000 marchers participating. And the hope of those organizers was to start a process of breaking down the prejudice against the LGBT community. So we were excited to set up this research design to try to evaluate that effort.

APSR: Let’s talk about the proximity mechanism you find―that you observe significant effects in Sarajevo, but that it diminishes as you move away from the capital. Do you have any expectations on how you could amplify this “Pride effect” to increase the positive behavioral effects beyond the immediate surroundings? Is there something we can learn more broadly from these findings about contentious politics in general?

PA: We saw correlations around proximity, but we wanted to substantiate and validate that finding with the mechanisms undergirding it. As a team, we have over a hundred interviews with different organizers and activists in Europe over many years, including in more receptive contexts and in more conservative contexts that have been known for resistance to Pride. We had some ideas about these mechanisms, but we wanted to add post-treatment interviews with key organizers to figure out what is going on in Bosnia, specifically.

I’ll give you a few key factors that activists pointed out. One of them was simply seeing the march and breaking down certain stereotypes by having Pride and marchers there in front of you. Another is the disruption that Pride caused, which activists saw positively―that no one could go to work without having to circumvent the Pride route. What this did was create a dialogue that was taking place around the dinner table, that people everywhere in Sarajevo had to talk about Pride and, through that, you would discover that maybe your neighbor was going or that maybe one of your kids had a different feeling about it, etc. And so it generated contact with Pride for people in Sarajevo.

And then there were other factors―for example, that people were only visible at the march themselves. They couldn’t wear rainbow attire when they left the march route, because the organizers were afraid of violence, so there was a strategy behind it that really amplified the visibility right around the event that wasn’t carried with folks when they returned home to other parts of the country. And then the media also varied a lot in the way that local reporters reported on it vs. outside Sarajevo―both in quantity and in quality. These were some mechanisms that help explain the localized correlational effects we uncovered.

SW: I think there are a few things that are worth keeping in mind about what we could export from this study. One is that while Bosnia is a conservative case by how we’ve defined it in the paper, but, within Bosnia, Sarajevo was really the best option for a positive reception of a Pride event in terms of pre-existing public opinion attitudes.

If you look at our data, about half the sample in Sarajevo before Pride have positive attitudes towards LGBT rights, and the other half was opposed in varying degrees. That environment may be a good test case for other locations to see whether Prides could serve as a tipping point for moving social norms in a direction that is more supportive of LGBT rights. What you don’t see in Sarajevo is extreme polarization or overwhelming opposition.

In Sarajevo, before Pride, we found that 47 percent of our sample was supportive of LGBT rights, and that increased by nearly 10 percent after Pride. Effectively this was a symbolic tipping point with a majority of people in the sample going from opposition to LGBT, opposition to Prides, opposition to visibility, to becoming potentially majority favorable. If you were going to attempt Pride in a place that had 85-95 percent opposition to LGBT rights, you might see much greater counter-mobilization tendencies and potentially the backlash could be detrimental to the local LGBT community.

Researchers and activists should be mindful of these conditions when considering future Prides. One should not infer from this study that activists can hold Prides in any social conservative society, and there will be a 10 percent bump in LGBT support. That’s not really what we’re saying here. Our surveys indicate, and Phil’s interviews with activists show that they agree, how people have got to be careful and strategic in selecting the location of these events if they’re going to work in the direction you hope them to.

APSR: What are your next steps, both for you and for other scholars?

PA: There are certain themes that also came out of this research that we think need more exploration. For example, what was really interesting about the proximity mechanisms was that in some of the interviews, activists were saying that proximity might work in a different way among people in LGBT communities themselves. They received overwhelmingly positive feedback from queer people around the country who were empowered and inspired by the events. One thing we might examine is how Pride effects might reach further within queer communities themselves.

APSR: Was there anything in the interviews with activists that inspired or challenged you?

PA: One example that I found inspiring in our interviews was this idea that the “fear” or the “threat” associated with LGBT people can be challenged by Pride. One of the activists was saying that people woke up the next day, and they realized that life had gone on and all of the worst fears proselytized didn’t materialize. And for them, the importance of a first Pride is showing that it wasn’t “the end of the world,” and also for folks to see that people taking part in the march are members of the indigenous society. That queer people exist in these local communities, despite so often being painted as “foreign” or as “this thing that happens elsewhere but not here,” and I think that is also a way that these events can change perceptions.

APSR: This is a great segue into your broader research agenda. One thing that’s very striking when you read this article is its very firm commitment to multi-methods. It’s got a lot packed into a relatively short count! You use activist interviews, survey experiments, panel data―was this a conscious decision, or something that unfolded throughout the writing process?

DP: We found out about Pride in the spring, and then we worked to put together a survey and field it in the run-up to the event. We established a pre-treatment post-treatment design. Once we collected that data and analyzed it, we got the quantitative results that you see in the paper.

PA: Yes, we were really inspired by the event itself and the unique potential that that event could have with this kind of pre-post treatment design. At the same time, a lot of our ideas on what might happen theoretically were informed by qualitative work that we and other scholars had conducted, and we always saw the potential for doing a post-treatment follow up. And this is something where we are really happy with the review process at the APSR, where we got fantastic, constructive reviews that really guided us in productive and rigorous directions. One of the ways that we thought we could flesh out was to follow through with these post-treatment interviews. So, they came to being organically in the process of writing our paper.

APSR: What were some of the unique challenges of studying politics in an understudied case? What lessons do you have for individuals who might be interested in studying cases that might be more difficult?

SW: In our case, we all have regional expertise so we knew what we were getting into. We had done other types of projects in Bosnia before as well as in other areas where it would be challenging for LGBT groups to organize and work. I think that prior experience helped make this a more successful project, so it’s important to know your case well.

We also did have great advice from reviewers in terms of feedback. I think to Phil’s credit, too, talking to the activist communities improved the quality of our overall project. Oftentimes, I think there’s a tendency to swoop in and do your work quickly and then leave, and we made an effort to follow-up with people on the ground who knew the Pride context very intimately, far better than we do, and this really helped clarify a number of things for us.

I really enjoyed the multimethod aspect of this project, and so if you are a scholar who can’t do it all, find people who have similar commitment or interest to your research topic and collaborate and bring all your strengths together. For us, this was a really enjoyable collaboration. I hope that shows in the writing and outcome. Others can easily replicate our methods here and apply them to their own projects.

APSR: You point out that people who are interested in contentious politics or social movements more broadly might be interested in this piece both from a methodological and empirical perspective. How much can other scholars of social movements take from this pattern of findings you uncover?

PA: Of course there are specific findings here, but at the same time our findings do extend in certain ways to other groups and we were also inspired by work on other communities. For example, the idea that contentious identity movements can trigger a backlash around groups that are more religious or nationalist, because, for example, national identity has a very fixed narrative and thus the fluidity of an issue like LGBT rights can challenge that.
That said, there’s a lot of other movements that are also fluid―for example, if you think of the fluidity of gender justice movements and how that triggers a similar backlash. Or the immigrant rights movement―how it’s seen to destabilize national identities. I think there will be elements that will be applicable, and we drew on other scholars’ work to come up with these postulates in the first place, so I hope we’re part of a wider scholarly discourse.

SW: I would hope that our work would be of interest to people who study, for example, labor movement activism, as well as political activism more broadly. We also think about oppositional movements that are taking place in illiberal democracies, semi-authoritarian, and competitive authoritarian regimes, and to what extent holding oppositional protests actually works to shift public opinion in the intended direction. We encourage social movement scholars to look at our design and think about possible extensions beyond our particular identity case.

APSR: What was the single thing that surprised, confounded, or excited you as you were conducting this research that you were not expecting to see?

DP: I was worried about backlash and violence, and I was pleased at the extent to which the cooperation with the local government led to a Pride that was successful. Counter protesters held their own demonstrations the day before Pride. The primarily positive findings in favor of the LGBT rights movement assuaged my worry about potential backlash.

SW: I was very proud of the results that we found in Sarajevo. I always felt that the city had an enduring openness, tolerance, and welcoming quality to it. Even though the war tried to tear that apart, many people have rebuilt and recovered. In terms of the data, there’s been an interesting movement in Bosnia away from rigid wartime identities that have become institutionalized since the Dayton Agreement in 1995. You’re seeing that in the way that younger generations of Bosnians are rejecting those divisive three-part Bosniak, Croat-Bosnian, Bosnian-Serb identities. In terms of superordinate identities, many are saying, “I want to be Bosnian, I don’t want to think in terms of these wartime divisions anymore. I want to be part of Europe.”

PA: For me, I think one of the best parts was getting to speak to these activists who made time for us, and given the pandemic, one of my highlights was learning and constantly being surprised by the innovative ways in which a contentious issue like this can be framed and packaged. There were many examples of that that we also discuss in the appendix that were inspiring. One finding that I was really touched by from the qualitative work, was that there was an intersectionally linked-fate process on display from Muslim communities who could conceptualize homophobia in relation to their experiences with Islamophobia. And that was also, at least from the perception of activists, something that challenged a little bit of what we hear in the popular discourse in the way their religion works, and so I thought that was a valuable side lesson that we didn’t intend to discover.

Phillip Ayoub is an Associate Professor in the Department of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College.

Douglas Page is a visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gettysburg College.

Sam Whitt is an Associate Professor of Political Science at High Point University.

Ayoub, Page, and Whitt’s APSR paper is available free of charge until the end of June 2021.