Sexuality unimportant in NZ politics

16 Mar, 2015 by Barry 2 Comments

A recent NZ poll surveyed how a range of the attributes of political leaders would affect the party vote of those polled. The attributes in question were sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, gender, union affiliation and religious beliefs.

The ethnicity and gender, were not significant factors for the majority of those polled, whereas age and strong religious beliefs were.

Attribute	Total*	More likely to vote	Less likely to vote	No difference	Don’t know / Refused
Of a different ethnicity to you	100	3	8	88	1
Of the same ethnicity to you	100	10	2	87	1
A woman	100	11	3	85	0
Gay (homosexual or lesbian)	100	2	20	77	1
Immigrant to NZ	100	2	34	60	3
Strong links to a union	100	11	32	53	3
Strong religious beliefs	100	7	41	48	3
Over 75 years old	100	4	59	36	1

*In some instances the total may not add up to 100 exactly due to rounding

It’s interesting to observe that only 20% of voters would be influenced negatively by a political leader being gay, whereas 48% would be influenced negatively by the leader having strong religious views. It’s pleasing to see that one’s ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation will have little bearing on one’s political standing.

I am surprised by the fact that being an immigrant might affect one’s chances at the polls. We are somewhat more xenophobic than I thought. Thankfully our constitution does not prohibit immigrants standing for the top political job in this country.

I wonder how these results compare to other parts of the world?

The survey was conducted by Research New Zealand using a nationally-representative sample of approximately 500 New Zealanders over 18.