Rainbow ballots: introducing the Italian LGBTIQ+ electoral survey 2024

The development of an empirics-based political science agenda on the electoral dimension of LGBTIQ+ citizens has been traditionally hindered by the widespread lack of individual-level data related to the sensitivity of their identity, including in Italy. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by first presenting an innovative survey, providing novel public-opinion data on the political participation, issue attitudes, and vote choice of a large number of Italian LGBTIQ+ citizens. We detail the rationale and challenges related to our research, leading to our strategic approach to the development of a self-selected sample based on an original sampling technique. On this basis, in an area of public debate often dominated by clichés rather than scientific evidence, we introduce first empirics on Italian LGBTIQ+ respondents. In line with existing studies from other Western national contexts, our LGBTIQ+ sample is active in civil society and politics – albeit not “activist” –, consistently votes in elections, and is markedly left-wing in values, issue attitudes, and vote choice. We discuss the scientific and societal contributions of our paper in detail.