Double List Analysis Assessing the Impact of Anti-Queer Legislation

Abstract

In this study, we assess the extent to which individuals in the United States misreport their attitudes regarding anti-LGBTQ+ educational legislation. Specifically, this study focuses on the Floridian bill HB 1557, or the "Don't Say Gay," bill. We utilize the inherently anonymous list experiment to minimize the prevalence of social desirability bias to elicit truthful responses from participants. We conduct two double list experiments to explore multiple facets of HB 1557. The size of the bias for each list is estimated by a difference-of-means analysis and can be viewed as a lower-bound estimate of the population's true views.This study was conducted via Prolific and gathered a sample that is representative of the larger American population on the basis of age, sex and race. We find that 69% of Americans would be comfortable with their child having an openly LGBTQ+ teacher, and 61% of Americans believe that the laws should allow for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ content in educational curriculum. Notably, we do not find the presence of social desirability regarding participant's views on LGBTQ+ content in educational curriculum. We also find that Americans significantly underestimate the amount of support on a national level for both of these concepts. These results build on the field of LGBTQ+ economics by providing evidence which indicates that support for anti-LGBTQ+ educational bills is not widespread.