Argentina, World Champion in LGBT Rights: How Did That Happen?

CORRALES JAVIER; PECHENY MARIO

Seattle

Congreso; American Political Science Association 2011 Annual Meeting; 2011

American Political Science Association

This paper seeks to understand why Argentina became so ahead of the game. We begin by looking at trends worldwide to identify factors associated with high scores in what we call “a gay-friendliness index.” This is an index that we created combining legal and cultural components about a country’s openness to various issues of importance to the LGBT community. We provide only preliminary results of the quantitative analysis, but we make the following points: 1) The Argentina case conforms to what both theory and empirical trends predict in terms of political rights and cultural values (levels of secularism), but not in terms of economic globalization. That is, Argentina has the levels of political freedoms and secularism that one associates with other countries with comparably high levels of gay-friendliness. 2) While Argentina’s level of secularism is high (much higher than those of Brazil), it is not that much higher than that of other Latin American countries for which there is data (Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico) 3) It seems, therefore, that something other than these three variables—political rights, secularism, and economic openness—must be invoked to explain why Argentina has become so a high achiever in LGBT rights in Latin America.