Publications

This book examines how U.S.-based civil society organizations have mobilized to undermine LGBTQ+ rights globally, revealing the interconnections between anti-queer advocacy and democratic erosion worldwide.

In the wake of significant increases in lesbian and gay (LG) immigration, do Americans view LG migrants as more deserving of entry to the United States than their straight counterparts? Using a conjoint survey experiment with 1,650 respondents, we investigate how potential immigrants' sexual-minority status affects Americans' perceptions of their deservingness for admission and their cultural similarity to the United States. Results show that, overall, Americans do not perceive LG immigrants as more deserving than straight ones, and LG immigrants are perceived as less culturally similar. But results also reveal heterogeneity: LG immigrants fleeing persecution are seen as more deserving of admission, and Democrats, atheists, and LG respondents consider LG migrants more deserving than straight ones. This paper helps disentangle Americans' preferences for migrants' presumed cultural similarity from economic potential and humanitarian merit as well as sheds light on public opinion of an understudied but politically salient group.

This study explores how nonprofits strategically deploy emotional versus cognitive appeals in communications, and how these different approaches influence donor giving and volunteer recruitment.

Social movements are composed of distinct political generations. Yet empirical work documenting distinct generations is limited, and work detailing the conflict and problems created by generational turnover exceedingly rare. Based on interviews with 39 leaders of LGBTQ+ organizations, supplemented with longitudinal administrative text data from 1,840 LGBTQ+ organizational mission statements, we demonstrate political generational change, and conflict, in the U.S. LGBTQ+ movement. The prior “Legacy” generation is confronted by an “Emergent” generation with different understandings of sexuality/gender, intersectionality, and organizational strategies. These conflictual differences produce material and emotional consequences as the “Legacy” generation takes their resources away and members of both generations feel erased from the movement’s collective identity. Leaders navigate these “choppy waters” by taking either a harsh approach, which seeks to dismiss whichever generation is viewed as hindering their organization’s work, or an inclusive approach that views generational tension as an opportunity to grow and strengthen their organization and the larger movement.

Both internationally and in the United States, the policy landscape for same-sex couples is changing rapidly, and surveys report swiftly increasing numbers of immigrants in same-sex couples in the US. Yet few researchers have examined immigrants in lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) couples on a large scale, especially regarding their relationship to LGB policy. Using American Community Survey data from 2008 to 2019 and original datasets indexing LGB policy changes in 122 countries and all US states, this study assesses and characterizes the scale of LGB migration to the US as well as the role of LGB policy. Compared to immigrants in different-sex couples, those in same-sex couples come from richer, more democratic countries that are less represented among immigrants in the US. They also tend to be more highly educated, work in more prestigious occupations, and have higher incomes. Fixed-effect models show that higher proportions of these immigrants come from LGB-friendly countries, and they are more likely to live in progressive US states.

Quantitatively capturing gender and sexuality using social surveys can be a controversial, political exercise—increasingly so in an age of political turmoil. Still, there is profound utility in quantitative metrics, particularly related to sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). This essay tracks the history, challenges, and potential opportunities for capturing survey-based SOGIESC data. We detail measurement developments related to sex and sex characteristics; sexual behavior; sexual orientation and identity; sexual attraction and desire; and gender identity and expression. Moreover, we showcase the challenges to capturing SOGIESC data amidst political turmoil. Paradoxically, the field of queer demography and survey-based measurement is simultaneously one of rapid innovation requiring emergency preservation. We ultimately call on sexuality scholars to help shape measurement practices, protect existing data, and ensure that knowledge about SOGIESC populations is not erased.

Anti-gender activism is at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, and leading advocates are increasingly leveraging transnational connections. Since 1997, the World Congress of Families has become a premier venue for anti-gender advocates of the “natural family” to interact through its robust conference system. We introduce the World Congress of Families Dataset containing the speakers, organizations, and locations from all global and most regional conferences from 1997 through 2022, which we gathered across a series of archival sources. Across descriptive and network analyses, we document the key organizations and individual leaders involved in the World Congress of Families, and we show that the network has grown substantially. Although actors from the United States are overrepresented, regional leadership is becoming more common as the network spreads, especially across post-Soviet and African countries.

Between 1990 and 2009, LGBT+ rights expanded as countries became more democratic, but in the following decade the trend reversed as legal inroads sparked backlash, making LGBT+ people a prime target of populist leaders who use democratic channels to curtail rights. This article examines the limited ability of democratic institutions built on majoritarian principles to protect LGBT+ rights and argues for reconceptualizing the relationship so that LGBT+ rights are seen not merely as a consequence of liberal democracy but as constitutive of it.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, same-sex partners of U.S. citizens became eligible for spousal visas. Since then, the United States has seen a rapid rise in same-sex, mixed-citizenship couples. However, this effect varies greatly depending on the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) policy context of the noncitizen’s country of origin. Using waves 2008–2019 of the American Community Survey, this study employs a triple-difference design to examine how the policy environment of the origin country moderates the effect of the end of DOMA on incidence of mixed-citizenship, same-sex couples in the United States. Quasi-Poisson models with two-way fixed effects show that, after 2013, individuals in mixed-citizenship, same-sex couples coming from countries with progressive LGB policies saw a more than 60% increase in incidence relative to those in different-sex or same-citizenship couples.

Integration into the international community is typically used to explain liberal outcomes. However, is it possible that such integration can also explain rising illiberalism? Using the case of LGBT+ rights, I argue that backlash to liberal norms is increasingly organized transnationally and that exposure to global norms via integration explains both liberal and illiberal outcomes. I test this argument through extensive original data collection and by using time-series cross-section, multinomial, and cross-lagged panel models. Robust findings reveal how exposure to global norms spurs policy backlashes—not just expansions—depending on how countries are situated within pro- and anti-LGBT+ transnational networks. This study contributes to our understanding of the changing international system by revealing how illiberal actors use mechanisms built by the liberal international community to transnationally organize and advance illiberal norms—ultimately fueling the deinstitutionalization of once-dominant liberal models.

In the past decade, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, rates of childhood vaccination against diseases such as measles, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus declined worldwide. Drawing on existing research on vaccine hesitancy and recent developments in world society theory, we link cross-national variation in vaccination rates to two global cultural processes: the dramatic empowerment of individuals and declining confidence in liberal institutions. Both processes, we argue, emerged endogenously in liberal world culture, instigated by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Fixed- and random-effects panel regression analyses of data for 80 countries between 1995 and 2018 support our claim that individualism and lack of institutional confidence contributed to the global decline in vaccination rates. We also find that individualism is itself partly responsible for declining institutional confidence.

Embeddedness within transnational networks influences how countries govern LGBT+ communities. Research commonly highlights how pro-LGBT+ networks enable the expansion of rights; however, increased transnational coordination between anti-LGBT+ actors means network embeddedness also leads to policy backlash. Therefore, an important question to ask is: why are countries differentially embedded within these opposing networks to begin with? Moreover, does embeddedness in one network influence embeddedness in the other over time? To answer these questions, I develop original datasets of transnational pro- and anti-LGBT+ networks from 1990 to 2018. Using cross-lagged and dynamic panel models, results reveal that there is indeed an interdependent relationship where opposing networks mutually engage, or “follow,” one another; however, these patterns vary across region.

Existing scholarship documents large worldwide increases in women’s participation in the public sphere over recent decades, for example, in education, politics, and the labor force. Some scholars have argued that these changes follow broader trends in world society, especially its growing liberalism, which increasingly has reconfigured social life around the choices of empowered and rights-bearing individuals, regardless of gender. Very recently, however, a variety of populisms and nationalisms have emerged to present alternatives to liberalism, including in the international arena. We use cross-national data to analyze changes in women’s participation in higher education, the polity, and the economy 1970–2017. We find that women’s participation on average continues to expand over this period, but there is evidence of a growing cross-national divergence. In most domains, women’s participation tends to be lower in countries linked to illiberal international organizations, especially in the recent-most period.

Prior research demonstrates the importance of domestic associations joining transnational advocacy networks to create social change. Few studies, however, investigate how dynamic political opportunities influence the structure of cross-national networks. To address this gap, we analyze an original dataset of 3,103 domestic lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) associations in Europe connected through joint membership in 46 LGBT international nongovernmental organizations from 2010 to 2020. Results from network and multilevel analyses reveal a relatively unstable network that is centrally comprised of associations located in adverse political contexts. More specifically, advocacy associations located in adverse political contexts, but recently joining the European Union, are more likely to occupy central positions in the network.

The United States is currently in the midst of a long, historic cultural transformation—redefining our collective representation to be inclusive of diverse sexual and gender identities. A core logic advancing this inclusion is to discursively recognize an expanded set of discrete, deconstructed identities—gay and lesbian expands to LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA+, and so on. But a newer logic stipulates that inclusion arises through using constructive identities that encompass many fluid experiences under a single term (e.g., “queer”). To understand inclusive change, the authors leverage a unique mesolevel site of cultural (re)production: service and advocacy nonprofit organizations. Using event history models, the authors investigate inclusive language change by 735 organizations from 1998 to 2016. They supplement analyses of administrative data with semistructured interviews with 13 nonprofit leaders, providing converging evidence. Findings showcase how bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down pressures explain both the inclusion of discrete identity labels and the shift to constructive logics.

The United States has long relied on private organizations to provide public services to poor communities. However, while the federal government’s support of the civic sector through grants and contracts is well studied, little research investigates how it subsidizes voluntary organizations through national service programs, such as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). In this article, we assess whether nonprofits that receive VISTA members show higher levels of donations and volunteers than matched nonprofits that did not receive VISTA members in the years following the Great Recession. We find that nonprofits that participated in the VISTA program had higher numbers of volunteers 2 years after participation, suggesting that national service was effective at supporting local organizations and building local civic infrastructure during an economic recovery.

Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest that they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement.

Many nonprofit organizations rely on donations to fund their programs, and a robust literature predicts donations in large-scale quantitative studies. The focus, however, is almost exclusively on the financial characteristics of the organizations, leaving the social context underexplored. In this article, we theorize how ecological context, organizational identity, and social network ties can shape donations. We use the new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release of e-filed nonprofit reporting forms to consider 95,518 501(c)3 nonprofits around 2015. Using lagged regression models, we find that organizations within a more favorable ecological context, those that use appeals to religion, and organizations with more volunteers report more donations.

Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do nonprofits succeed in increasing donations and volunteers amid widespread competition for these resources? We argue that nonprofits attract donors and volunteers by connecting to their emotions. We use newly available administrative IRS 990 e-filer data to analyze 90,000 nonprofit missions from 2012 to 2016. Computational text analysis measures the positive or negative affect of each nonprofit’s mission statement. We find that expressed positive emotion is often associated with higher donations and volunteers, especially in bonding fields. But for some types of nonprofits, combining positive sentiment with negative sentiment in a mission statement is most effective in producing volunteers.

Despite years of success, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) norms are becoming increasingly polarized across the global landscape—with some countries strongly complying with new expectations while others openly defy them. To explain these divergent paths, I investigate the transmission of global LGBT norms via two mechanisms: transnational advocacy networks and foreign aid conditionalities. In examining LGBT policy adoption across 110 non-OECD countries between 1990 and 2016, I find evidence that exposure to LGBT norms through transnational advocacy networks enhances the effect of these norms and is associated with more progressive policy adoption, while greater dependence on foreign aid pushes states to reject LGBT norms.

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs.

In the late twentieth century, researchers began calling attention to declining social capital in America and the potential consequences of this trend for a healthy society. We develop a new measure of associational social capital using a confirmatory factor analysis of six indicators from the Civic Engagement Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 2008–2011 and 2013. Our findings support previous research suggesting that associational social capital does not seem to be declining over time. However, we do find evidence of a nonlinear decrease in associating during the Great Recession years. Across the entire time period, membership in groups has not declined and there has been little practical change in the amount of time that individuals spend with neighbors.

Since the late 1990s, a growing body of literature has researched the cross-national diffusion of policies that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. Considering the ever-increasing notion that LGBT rights are human rights, this study contrasts the role of human rights international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and LGBT INGOs on LGBT policy diffusion between 1991 and 2015. This study develops a new measure of global LGBT norms and offers a comprehensive LGBT Policy Index for a global sample of 156 countries. Through pooled cross-sectional time series with fixed effects, the results demonstrate that human rights INGOs are not adequate vehicles for pressuring national adoption of LGBT policies. Instead, targeted advocacy efforts, embodied through LGBT INGOs, are required in order for policy adoption to transpire.

This chapter reviews the relationship between gender equality and democratization, examining how women's political participation shapes and is shaped by democratic transitions and consolidation.

This report develops and validates a new county-level measure of social capital for the Corporation for National and Community Service, enabling more precise tracking of civic engagement across U.S. communities.