Power distributed by sexual orientation

By: V-Dem Staff
Aug 30, 2016


In addition to this social equality perspective, we can also ask how the LGBT community fares across the world in terms of their political power. The V-Dem Power Distributed by Sexual Orientation Indicator measures this for countries and regions from 1900 to the present day. In the chart, we see that Western Europe has experienced steady improvement in this indicator since the end of the Second World War. Latin America, on the other hand, has had a stable and low score on this indicator until the 1980s and has been steadily improving ever since. Improvements for the Southeast Asian LGBT community have occurred at a slower pace. While they were scoring marginally better than Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, they have fallen behind since the early 2000s.

Finally, we see that scores for East African countries have actually experienced a slight dip in the last decade. The reason for such a decline could be attributed to recent anti-homosexual legislation in countries in the region.

You can find further information about the indicator, along with other countries, regions, and indicators on v-dem.net, using the online analysis tools.