Queering the Commons: Overcoming Polarisation With Identity-based Connections
Funder: Leverhulme Trust
Principal Investigator: Dr William Daniel
Duration: February 2025- January 2026
As part of the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships, this project explores how politicians from different political parties – but with similar personal backgrounds – use personal commonalities as a way of building professional connections that can ultimately relieve contentious forms of polarisation.
Many legislatures permit affinity groups outside of committees to allow like-minded politicians to connect on areas of mutual interest. For example, parliaments might use legislative member organisations to unite colleagues from a shared traditional community, with a common interest in a political policy, or even offer a form to discuss a similar set of personal hobbies.
This project explores identity-based affinity groups, asking whether they might also be useful to reduce polarisation among political elites. Using the case of four prominent LGBTQIA+ groups in the Scottish, Westminster, French, and European Parliaments, the project explores how connections made between group members within affinity groups can affect cross-party interactions in other legislative settings. The project takes inspiration from scholarship on ethnic and gender identity’s effects on political behaviour that has been less explored for sexuality. It argues that identities that divide us in one setting might bind us in another.
Project outputs will include at least 3 academic articles, including a conceptual piece on legislative affinity groups and political cooperation, an empirical political science piece on the effect of shared membership on affinity groups on legislative behaviour, and a qualitative/critical piece, drawing primarily upon interview/archival data.