Measuring Mayoral Responsiveness to Latine Lesbians and Gay Men

Abstract Using a national audit of mayors in the United States, this paper examines responsiveness to Latine lesbian and gay constituents who request that their city issue an LGBTQ pride proclamation. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, descriptive representation, and political institutions, we articulate the conditions under which mayors are responsive to public-facing constituency service requests to issue LGBTQ pride proclamations. We find that mayors are more responsive to requests from lesbian couples than gay couples. In addition, baseline responsiveness to our inquiry was influenced by mayors’ identity characteristics. LGBTQ mayors were more likely to respond than non-LGBTQ mayors, but Latine mayors were less likely to respond than non-Latine mayors. In addition, mayors who represent cities where nondiscrimination ordinances protect LGBT people from discrimination were more responsive than mayors who represent cities where LGBT people are not protected from discrimination. These findings demonstrate how intersectional frameworks can advance audit experiments and that shared descriptive characteristics do not inevitably translate into responsiveness, a common assumption in single-axis studies of representation.