Is homonationalism influencing public opinion? Experimental and survey evidence from the UK and Romania

Abstract

Homonationalism is a proposed value configuration that promotes both accepting gay people and prejudice towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. This value configuration contrasts with the widely supported theory that all prejudices are positively related, and are explained by underlying causes such as authoritarianism. Although homonationalism has received attention in qualitative research on mass-media and political discourse, this is the first quantitative exploration of the concept. We used data from a society likely to be high on homonationalism (UK), and one likely to be low (Romania). None of our results were consistent with homonationalism, either in an experiment conducted with students (Study 1, N = 110), or in a secondary analysis of data from the same two countries (Study 2, N = 2638). Ethnic prejudice and homophobia were positively related, while homonationalism was negatively related to homophobia and authoritarianism. Homonationalism has little utility as a construct for understanding public opinion at this point in time, and research investigating it at other levels of analysis may be more fruitful.