On Tuesday, member states of the United Nations voted down a proposal by Russia to curtail benefits to the same-sex spouses of U.N. employees. The vote was much more than a simple human resources question, with U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power making an appearance urging countries to vote down the Russian effort. The graph above illuminates how countries voted based on the two most prominent dimensions: global politics and domestic acceptance of homosexuality.
The horizontal axis plots countries’ ideal points based on their overall voting record in the United Nations. The method for estimating this is described in detail here, and more succinctly here. Essentially, this is the same methodology people use to estimate how liberal or conservative members of Congress are. Countries more to the right of the space are closer to the United States in their voting pattern, with Iran being the country most distinct in its geopolitical ideology. Unfortunately the data is from 2012. For the most part, countries are pretty stable, but I suspect that Russia has moved quite a bit to the left in this space. (I’ll update the data soon).
The vertical axis plots public acceptance of homosexuality. This is based on World Values Studies surveys. An explanation is here. Higher values indicate more acceptance (scale runs from 1-10). Data are generally from the 2010s but some times date back to 2008. There is data on 89 countries.
Both variables are strong and significant correlates of the U.N. vote (p<.01 in an ordinal probit if you care about that kind of thing). What is striking is that if a country is beyond the mid-point on the ideological dimension (0), then public acceptance of homosexuality almost seems irrelevant: You vote against the resolution no matter what. Especially striking are countries like Serbia, Albania and Georgia, where public acceptance of homosexuals is exceptionally low. Presumably, geopolitics leads these countries to choose the U.S. (and European) position on this issue.
The same is not always true on the other side of the spectrum. Brazil, South Africa and, especially, Venezuela are noteworthy examples of countries that voted against the Russian resolution, perhaps because public acceptance of homosexuals is reasonably high. Several Southeast Asian countries abstained.
Perhaps the country that stands out most, though, is Russia. Russia disagrees often with the United States, but it is still somewhat in the middle of the ideological spectrum (although, as I noted above, this may have worsened somewhat since 2012, see here for some historical perspective). The Russian populace is certainly not terribly welcoming of homosexuals, but it is also not among the most conservative on this issue, not even in Europe.
So why did Russia take the initiative on this vote? A plausible explanation is that Russia is trying to reach out to potential allies who feel threatened by U.S. criticisms of their LGBT rights policies. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have already bonded over this issue. China has long assured its trading partners and allies that it will not interfere with its domestic human rights policies. Russia seems to want to go a step beyond this by challenging more liberal ideas about human rights embedded in international institutions and perhaps positioning itself as a leader on this front. This is presumably also one of the reasons the United States wanted to make sure that the initiative was defeated with a wide margin.
It is not entirely clear how much Russia will gain from initiatives like this. It splits the BRICS countries (see Brazil and South Africa), but it is also apparent that Russia is more likely to find its allies to its left on the global ideological spectrum than on the other side. Moreover, initiatives like this seem to play well domestically for Putin, so I do not expect that this is the last of it.
Edit 3/26: Graph updated to make the colors between yes and no votes more distinct and to add dashed cutting line. Previous graph is here.
