Our Global LGBT+ Rights and Citizenship project is examining how active and engaged citizenship can be enhanced through improved rights for LGBT+ people. But what do we actually mean when we say this, and is citizenship in a country better when it has a more positive record on LGBT+ rights?
When we talk about citizenship, what we mean is membership of a community. In the context of state relations and global politics, this community should be understood as a body of people living in a state that grants them rights under a constitution (or another fundamental law that legitimises the existence of that state). A citizen is therefore someone protected by the rights guaranteed to them by law, and citizenship rights are those fundamental rights that facilitate an individual’s civic participation and engagement with the public sphere.
In T.H. Marshall’s seminal essay Citizenship and Social Class, citizenship rights are defined as a collection of civil, political and social rights. Civil – or legal – rights include freedom of speech, property rights, and individual liberty. Political rights include the right to vote, the right to political representation, and open access to the political process and political power. Social rights include a right to economic security, guaranteed by the state through provisions such as education, healthcare and welfare. Taken together, citizenship rights guarantee an individual a certain level of dignity, security and freedom in society which gives the citizenry a higher stake in the success of a state.
Yet the reality is that many countries do not give LGBT+ people these fundamental protections, which can make them feel like lesser citizens and disenfranchise a large section of society. Criminalisation of homosexuality, for example, legally denies a gay person their existence; similarly, discriminating against and scapegoating LGBT+ people with HIV can exclude them from accessing healthcare services in a way that heterosexual people are not. It is surely no coincidence, then, that some of the most successful and developed countries in the world with highly active civic bodies and institutions also have a stronger LGBT+ rights record.
To test this relationship, we can compare the strength of a country’s citizenship score against its acceptance and inclusion of LGBT+ people. Handily, both of these variables have already been quantified by separate pieces of research.
The US News & World Report magazine, in collaboration with BAV Group and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, produces an annual ‘Best Countries’ ranking of 80 states that takes into account numerous variables including quality of life, entrepreneurship, cultural influence, heritage and citizenship. The citizenship sub-ranking is calculated from an equally weighted average of scores from several attributes that relate to a country’s citizenship, including human rights, religious freedoms, property rights, gender equality and well-distributed political power. Each of the 80 countries has a citizenship sub-ranking from #1 to #80 determined by an averaged score between 0.0 and 10.0 i.e. Norway, which is #1 in the citizenship rankings, scores 10.0 whereas Iran, which is #80 in the citizenship rankings, scores 0.0.
Williams Institute researchers at the UCLA School of Law have produced indices that measure the LGBT+ rights situation in dozens of countries. The Global Acceptance Index (GAI) measures public opinion to rank the social acceptance of LGBT+ people in each country (using survey data from 2009-2013). This is less relevant to a state’s legal record on LGBT+ rights but is an interesting variable nonetheless. The Legal Environment Index (LEI) tallies the number of LGBT-inclusive laws in a country whilst also taking into account the pattern of adopting these laws, and gives a country a score from 0-4 based on this legal environment (most recently updated in 2016).
Both of these indices have been measured against the 0.0-10.0 citizenship score, as shown below. 76 observations were made, as 4 of the countries on the citizenship rankings were not accounted for in the GAI and LEI data.
Both charts indicate a positive correlation between LGBT+ social/legal inclusion and a country’s citizenship score. LGBT+ social acceptance shows a particularly positive relationship with citizenship, however it should be noted that the GAI is decimalised whereas the LEI is not. While no strong inferences should be made due to numerous limitations in the data (not least the limiting sample size of the citizenship rankings), we can begin to see how a country’s legal and social treatment of LGBT+ people can relate to the strength of its citizenship, and that there are grounds to assume that improved rights for LGBT+ people enhances civic activity, openness and engagement.
Some of the outliers on the LGBT+ legal inclusiveness chart have been highlighted as they represent curious anomalies. Japan, for example, scores highly on the citizenship rankings with its democratic institutions and relative social progressiveness but has no national laws granting protections for LGBT+ people or recognition of same-sex relationships. Switzerland, similarly, scores highly in the citizenship rankings due to citizens’ property rights, access to political power, and religious freedoms, but as of 2019 does not have LGBT+ hate crime laws, no anti-discrimination laws for gender identity, no same-sex marriage and no joint adoption for same-sex couples. Colombia, on the other hand, is 53rd in the citizenship rankings with severe inequalities in political power and limited religious and property rights, but has one of the strongest LGBT+ rights records in South America with comprehensive anti-discrimination laws, same-sex marriage, adoption rights, access to IVF and surrogacy, and gender reassignment rights.
Understandably, there are many more variables in play that affect the strength of a country’s citizenship and these are likely to account for the anomalies in the data. In terms of LGBT+ rights as a variable in active and engaged citizenship, the empirical observations offered here suggest there is a positive correlation. Stronger and more reliable inferences could be drawn from data with larger sample sizes and an index that uses a decimalised scale, which would improve precision and account for more variation.
Referenced in this post:
T.H Marshall (1950), Citizenship and social class: and other essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
US News & World Report (2019), Best Countries Rankings. Read the Citizenship sub-rankings and data at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/citizenship-rankings
Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (2018), New Measures of LGBT Acceptance and Inclusion Worldwide. Read the Global Acceptance Index and Legal Environment Index data at https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/lgbt-acceptance-inclusion-worldwide/