Do We Need More LGBTQ Politicians? Evidence from the Mental Cost of Hate Crime

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Abstract

Exposure to specific negative information has an impact on mental health, particularly affecting minority groups in relatively vulnerable social positions. This study delves into the correlation between exposure to hate crimes against LGBTQ individuals and the mental health of the LGBTQ community.

Our methodology involves utilizing the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics Program (HCSP) to quantify occurrences of hate crimes against LGBTQ individuals. The HCSP compiles data on hate crimes motivated by biases related to race or ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity. It encompasses crimes reported to the police that, upon investigation, provide sufficient evidence to be classified as hate crimes.

Subsequently, we utilize data from The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to assess the mental well-being of the LGBTQ community. The BRFSS dataset offers the advantage of enabling us to distinguish between LGBTQ and cis-family groups, allowing for a comparative analysis of their mental health conditions.

Comparing the mental health outcomes of those in a same-sex household (SSH, who will be more likely to be sexual minorities) and those of different-sex households (DSH), we found that the SSH individuals are more sensitive to the negative impact from the hate crime happenings. When the hate crime happenings increases by one percent, the SSH individuals are TWICE more likely to witness mental issues (extensive margin) and TWICE the length of happening of mental issues (intensive margin). In addition, we extend the model to see the impacts of different levels of hate crime happenings. The results show that as the number of hate crime increase, the negative impact among SSH individuals increases more substantially.

In the second section, we switch our attention to investigate if having a LGBTQ politician can mitigate the negative impact from hate crime. We merge our data with the LGBTQ politician information we collected from wikipedia. We extend the model to incorporate the status of having a LGBTQ leader and its party affiliation (republican/democratic). We first show that, with the control of previous LGBTQ politicians in the given state, having an LGBTQ leader will significantly mitigate the negative impacts of hate crime on mental health, outcomes including the probability of having mental issues, probability of having extreme mental issues and the length of having mental issues.

Having a democratic politician in office will significantly mitigate impacts on both individuals while having more impacts among SSH individuals. For SSH individuals, an additional democratic politician currently in office will decrease the probability of having mental issue by 0.48 percent (0.36 as of DSH individuals), the probability of having extreme mental issue by 0.29 percent (0.20 percent as of DSH individuals) and the days of having mental issue by 0.03 day (0.01 day as of DSH individuals).

Having a republican LGBTQ leader, being very rare, will significantly mitigate the negative impacts among DSH individuals while having insignificant impacts among SSH individuals. For DSH member, having an additional Republican politician in office will reduce the probability of having mental issue by 0.92 percent, the probability of having extreme mental issue by 0.68 percent and days of having mental issue by 0.12 day. Yet these numbers for the LGBTQ individuals are all insignificant.

Author

• Peiyuan Li, Duke Kunshan University