Politics and Context: Public Opinion, Representation, and Group Consciousness

Situational contexts vary substantially across the country. This variation provides conditions where a subset of the American public may be exposed to situations that others are not. How do contexts affect the politics of minority groups? In this dissertation, I examine how the politics of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are situated by differing contexts across the United States. I examine how LGB presence aects and conditions the approval of the mass public. I examine the mechanism this influence bears on representative behavior in Congress. I finally examine how varying contexts uniquely affects some LGBs over others. In total, I find that varying contexts situate the political positions of LGB people differently. This results in unique conditions where LGB people are politically in influentialand cohesive.