Can wartime conditions weaken the impact of anti-LGBTIQ politics? Ayoub, Page, and Whitt (2025) show that tying a party’s anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric to Putin’s war justifications shifted voter support toward Poland’s opposition coalition.
As the authors explain, while existing research debates how war can trigger realignments in voting coalitions, we still know very little about how war influences deeper cultural conflicts, especially when politicians weaponize homophobia and transphobia as major social divisions during wartime campaigns.
To examine this dynamic, Ayoub, Page, and Whitt analyzed original survey data gathered ahead of Poland’s 2023 parliamentary election, an election that ultimately unseated the anti-LGBTIQ Law and Justice Party (PiS). In that race, which unfolded against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the governing right-wing conservative PiS and the challenger coalition led by the center-right liberal Civic Platform (PO) clashed sharply over values like tolerance for LGBTIQ rights.
Through a survey experiment, the authors discovered that simply informing voters about PiS’s anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric did not boost support for either PiS or PO. However, when that identical information was paired with Putin’s homophobic and transphobic justifications for the Russo-Ukrainian war, voter backing shifted significantly toward PO.
Ultimately, Ayoub, Page, and Whitt conclude that these findings reveal the clear limitations of anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric as a once-dependable campaign strategy, while also pointing to a practical approach for pushing back against the political appeal of homophobia and transphobia.
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Ayoub, P. M., Page, D., & Whitt, S. (2025). Anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric and electoral outcomes under the shadow of war: Evidence from Poland’s 2023 parliamentary election. European Journal of Political Research, 64(4), 2078–2092. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.70014