Recently I finished my honours thesis in political science on voting behaviour at the Australian National University. It was graded a first class honours. I used aggregate neighbourhood populations of gays and lesbians to predict party vote. I unexpectedly found a split in how gay and lesbian communities vote. I would need to conduct an individual level study to confirm the findings hence why I am looking to fund a question the AuSSA.

This was the first study of its kind there is no theory to explain why there would be a difference in how gay and lesbian communities behave politically. As we know nothing about how Australian gay men and lesbians vote - it is time Australian political science paid attention to this "invisible minority" and actually asked the question. I want to study the LGBT vote in Australia and overseas. To do this I need to add to the surveys on social attitudes and voting a question which asks for LGBT identification.

At present the only empirical work done on gays and lesbians is on:
1) their sexual behaviour and
2) why they are gay or lesbian.
Frankly I think gays and lesbians are more than just who they go to sleep with or why they sleep with the same sex so I want to study their social attitudes, sociology, and politics just as other minorities are such as ethnic, and religious etc.

No survey has asked for sexual identification, however there is a wealth of information on gender, education, socio-economic status, religion, age, race, first language, marital status, occupation, urban-rural etc. Political scientists and sociologists have understandings about many visible minorities but in Australia they have not asked anything on sexuality. This needs to change.

There is lots of research on minority politics, their political behaviour and social attitudes such as between different religions, different migrant groups, etc. So why shouldn't there be an academic understanding on the differences between homosexual and heterosexual behaviour and social attitudes?

It is simply my drive to prove there are differences between queer Australians and heterosexual Australians and differences between lesbians and gay men in political behaviour. I would keen to look at the motivations for their behaviours. I want to be the first person to systematically prove there is a queer vote in Australia and different queer voters vote differently.

The funds will be used to purchase a question on the next Australian Social Attitudes Survey (http://aussa.anu.edu.au/) on gay and lesbian identification.

The only challenge is getting funding.
I require a minimum of $1,000 to get my question onto the survey. However there may be a poor response rate which is a possible barrier to getting good data. Typically there are only 1,600 responses to 4,000 surveys. Ideally, I would like 4,000 surveys - any additional funds would go into paying for additional surveys to be conducted to get numbers up to do interesting statistical research. With 1,600 responses I can expect about 80 responses to gay and lesbian. This is a low number of responses which would make it difficult to look into things such as party voting behaviours. If enough surveys were paid for so that there were 4,000 survey responses from say 16,000 paid surveys mailed out, then there would be large enough numbers to conduct some very interesting and unique research into Australian sexuality, sociology, and political science.