Why do some countries have more gay politicians than others?
Interesting piece in Time online about openly gay politicians in Europe, of which there are a surprising abundance. The mayor of Paris, for example, is evidently gay, as are the mayors of Germany’s two biggest cities (Berlin and Hamburg).
The article is more or less written from the “why there and not here?” perspective, contrasting the success openly gay politicians have had in Europe versus the US, with the predictable conclusions about tolerance, etc.
I think, though, that it’s also important to also realize how countries with less democratic political systems and more elitist media outlets, such as those in Europe, can more easily establish a somewhat “false consensus” on controversial issues like homosexuality in the national culture, than in a country like the US, which has more populist institutions.
Here’s what I mean. Take the lesbian prime minister of Iceland, Ingibjorg Gisladottir, a politician whose success the Time article makes a great celebration of. Ms. Gisladottir became prime minister last year not because she was popularly elected by the citizens, but rather because she staged a parliamentary coup of sorts. As leader of the minority party in a two-party coalition government, Ms. Gisladottir abruptly threatened to withdraw her party’s support from the coalition in February of 2009, unless she was made prime minister. The majority party refused, and the two divorced, forcing a leadership crisis. Then the President of Iceland, who is this sort of mediator figure in their system, appointed Ms. Gisladottir to lead a new, even smaller coalition government composed of her party and the parliament’s third place, far-left party. And that’s how the world got it’s first ever openly gay prime minister.
European politics tend to be heavily controlled by a handful of strong, unelected, hierarchical party “bosses” who determine the country’s leadership amongst themselves, via complex parliamentary games and coalitions which rarely involve consulting the public. In finishing a distant second place, we would say that Ms. Gisladottir and her party clearly lost the last election by North American standards, yet she still wound up as prime minister anyway. In such a political climate, it’s not hard to understand how “controversial” figures can have a much easier time working their way through the system than they can in the US, which with its republican institutions, primaries, and direct elections tends to give the public a lot more veto power.
It’s not a defense of the bigotry that characterizes some sectors of the American electorate, of course, it’s just that the American system gives the public’s biases much more influence on their government, resulting in a political culture that allows unpleasant opinions to have greater power than they do in Europe. Or perhaps instead of “unpleasant opinions” I could use the more broader label of “opinions that go against the preference of the political class.” It’s the same reason why controversial ideas (like, say, government-run healthcare), as well as controversial individuals, can have a harder time making the sort of headway in the US as they seem to so easily achieve in the EU.
Media culture is a related issue. Talking about Ms. Gisladottir, Time says the Icelandic media consciously “ignored” mentioning her sexuality as much as possible, adding this quote:
“The media silence echoed the sentiment of the public. Nobody cared about her sexual orientation,” says Margret Bjornsdottir, the director of the Institute for Public Administration and Politics at the University of Iceland. “Being gay is a nonissue here. It’s considered unremarkable.”
It’s somewhat circular logic, though. We don’t report about things the public doesn’t care about, and what the public doesn’t care about is evidenced by our reporting. I heard the same sort of logic used to justify the Canadian media’s reluctance to admit the fact that popular CBC comedian Rick Mercer was gay. The argument was made that Canadians don’t care about the private lives of popular figures, which is just patently untrue, as anyone who has been to a Canadian supermarket checkout can attest. A more accurate statement would be that the people who run the Canadian media did not consider Mercer’s sexuality to be an issue, and would prefer if the public felt the same way. And if a country’s media options are limited, state-funded, or heavily subsidized, as they are in small countries like Iceland and Canada, it becomes much easier for such media outlets to impose a similar sort of elite-driven “false consensus” on the public than could be done in a society with a more populist, market-driven, public-pandering media culture.
Anyway, the point is that institutions matter, and it’s wrong for institutional factors to go ignored when we discuss why one unusual phenomena (such as gay politicians) are more accepted in one country than another. There can be no doubt that public opinion plays a huge role, but very few democracies allow it to play the biggest role.
