Lectures and conversations

After the Ruling: Electoral Consequences of Transgender Rights Retrenchment in the UK


Michal Grahn, assistant professor at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, will present results from a candidate-choice conjoint experiment.

Michal Grahn is an assistant professor at the Department of Government at Uppsala University. His areas of interest include political representation, behavior, gender, and sexuality politics, and is invited to do this Tuesday seminar by the SUCCESS project. For this presentation, he will present results from a candidate-choice conjoint experiment fielded to 1 500 British adults weeks after the ruling that "woman" under the Equality Act refers exclusively to biological sex. The authors of the paper are Sophie Mainz, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Uppsala University, and Michal Grahn, where the latter will present their work at this seminar.

Light lunch will be served, as first come, first served. 

The event is hybrid, if you can not join us in the Corner room at Sofie Lindstrøms hus, you can join us digitally. (external link)

 

Welcome!

Abstract

When do voters who support minority rights fail to punish politicians who roll them back? We study this in the context of transgender rights in the UK, exploiting the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling that "woman" under the Equality Act refers exclusively to biological sex. A candidate-choice conjoint experiment fielded to 1,500 British adults weeks after the ruling shows that candidates who endorse it enjoy a 12-point electoral advantage. This is true even though most respondents express positive attitudes toward trans people. Left-wing voters are indifferent between pro- and anti-ruling candidates. Only Greens punish endorsement. We argue that rapid opinion change, cross-partisan elite consensus, and judicial legitimation can together produce electoral permissiveness: a condition in which sympathy for a minority group no longer translates into electoral protection for its rights.