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Gays Don’t Vote Straight?: The Effect of Sexuality at the 2010 & 2013 Australian Federal Elections, and the Gap between Lesbians & Gay Men

This paper examines the effect of sexuality at the 2010 and 2013 Australian federal elections. This is the first study to investigate the impact of sexuality on the vote in Australia. It demonstrates that gay and lesbian communities have distinct voting patterns when controlling for socioeconomic status, life cycles, religion, age and gender. It presents four findings. First, sexuality has an effect on voting behaviour. Second, lesbians affect neighbourhood voting behaviours to a greater extent than gay men. Third, there is a difference in the direction of partisan support between gay and lesbian communities. Lesbian communities tend to support Labor and the Greens, while the relationship between gay men and the vote is less clear. At the 2013 election, lesbians were positively correlated with the vote for the Greens while gay men where negatively correlated. Fourth, there was a change in the structure of the lesbian vote between the 2010 and 2013 elections. This study uses factor analysis and multiple linear regression techniques to analyse aggregate data from the ABS 2011 census and AEC data from the 2010 and 2013 elections. The argument that gay and lesbians affected neighbourhood votes in 2013 conflicts with previous literature of LGBT voting, namely Hertzog (1996) and Schaffner & Senic (2006). The motivational factors for LGBT voting for Schaffner and Senic were material. I propose that the Australian context in 2013 suggests that different voting behaviours are the result of gay men being more materialist and lesbians having greater post-materialist concerns. De facto LGBT relationships by the 2010 election had the same material benefits as heterosexual relationships, meaning that the politics of marriage at the 2013 election were purely post-materialist in kind. The split between gay and lesbian Greens voting behaviour, therefore, could be a result of different motivational factors behind the vote for each.