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Using the formation of a lesbian and gay electoral constituency as a case, this article demonstrates how activists and party elites contest and construct collective identities and groups. Activist–party interactions produce identity-building feedback that recognizes some groups and identities and rejects others, creating conditions for people to see themselves as partisans. I call this process "constitutive group mobilization." I find that, when party actors affirmed civil rights and libertarian constructions of lesbian and gay people and politics, mobilization was relatively bipartisan. Republicans' emerging alliance with the Christian Right, however, brought activists to form the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Democratic Clubs, crystallizing civil rights as the dominant linkage to partisanship. These developments reveal how groups and identities form endogenously to parties rather than entering the party system as preformed entities with fixed interests and partisanship. Thus, the lesbian and gay case provides insights about group and identity formation previously overlooked in party and LGBT politics scholarship.

Theories of out-group hostility have long held that attitudes about marginalized groups are important predictors of policy support. These theories, however, have mostly examined the attitudes of white people and sexual orientation has rarely been a category of analysis. Thus, we know less about whether these theories are conditional on group position in racial and sexual hierarchies. This paper argues that processes of marginalization shape out-group hostility. Using comparative relational analysis, I examine support for pro-minority policies among white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people, straight people of color and whites. I find that ethnocentrism is not a general predictor of out-group hostility among the members of marginalized groups. Alternatively, group-targeted homophobia, racism, and nativism predict opposition to pro-minority policies, but the members of marginalized groups have more egalitarian attitudes overall. These findings challenge long-held conventional wisdoms about prejudice, underscoring the importance of centering on marginalized groups in public opinion.

"LGBT People as a Relatively Politically Powerless Group" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractMarriage rights were extended to same‐sex couples in the United States in 2015. However, anecdotes of bureaucratic noncompliance (in the form of bias or denial of license issuance) raise the possibility that de jure marriage equality has not led to equality in practice. We investigate this by conducting a nationwide audit experiment of local‐level marriage license–granting officials in the United States. These officials vary in the constituencies they serve, as well as how they are selected, allowing us to evaluate long‐standing hypotheses about bureaucratic responsiveness. Overall, we find no evidence of systematic discrimination against same‐sex couples—regardless of responsiveness measure, institutions, ideology, or prior state legal history. We find, however, that among same‐sex couples, officials tended to be more responsive to lesbian couples. In contrast to evidence in other areas of service provision, such as policing and federal assistance programs, we find bureaucrats tasked with provision of marriage services show little evidence of discrimination.