Non-linear changes in public opinion on LGBT in Estonia and Ukraine

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people has improved significantly and attitudes towards these vulnerable social groups have become more favorable, but discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity remain widespread. Based on the corpus of data obtained during 1991–2023 from series of representative international and national studies, changes in public opinion about LGBT people in two post-Soviet countries were analyzed. It is shown that despite the numerous differences between Estonian and Ukrainian societies, different legislative fields and other factors, the dynamics of attitudes towards LGBT issues in both countries have many common features (namely, the initial period of stable low public support for LGBT is replaced by its rapid growth, which, in in turn, passes into a period of stable high support), and the process of changes in public opinion over time can be described by a logistic equation. The nature of changes in public opinion described in the article is applied to most of the considered data, and the duration of the initial period of stable-low support (on average, 11 years for Estonia and about 20 years for Ukraine) is comparable to the period separating two generations. The applied mathematical model gives grounds for predicting that the maximum of public support for LGBT may be reached in Estonia at the end of the 2020s, and in Ukraine at the beginning of the 2030s. Unfortunately, social stigmatization of LGBT issues significantly limits the availability of data that can become basis of the analysis. The article discusses some possible factors of changes in public support for LGBT issues (the number and openness of LGBT people, instability in the respective societies / states, etc.), and outlines the heuristic value of the proposed model and directions for further development.