While there are exceptions, economically and culturally progressive views tend to go together- or so the common consensus goes. Perhaps not so if you’re a European. Europeans who believe that the government should reduce differences in income levels, are thirty three percent more likely to disagree with the statement “Gays and lesbians should be free to live as they wish” than Europeans who believe the government should not reduce differences in income levels- or at least that’s what I found using microdata from the European Social Survey.

Perhaps this negative relationship is simply a result of the inclusion of former Eastern-Bloc countries, which tend to be much more economically than culturally progressive? I tested this by looking at the relationship within some western European countries. In Austria there is a paltry .05 correlation between support for gay and lesbian rights and and support government intervention to reduce income inequality, and the P value is not even significant despite the huge sample size (N=1433). In Great Britain it’s only a slightly more robust R=.12, explaining a little over one percent of the variance. So at least the sign is going the right way now, but the effect is extremely small, too small to support the idea of a substantial relationship. [Edit: I may have been a bit hasty here, it turns out that a lot of variables in the survey seem to correlate a lot more weakly than you would suppose. For example how often one engages in social activities relative to others one’s own age and how often one socialises with friends, family and colleagues seem like conceptually very similar questions, but they only correlate .36].

Into these already murky waters let’s throw a more detailed breakdown of the stats at the European level:

The above graph isn’t easy to follow, I apologise for that- I didn’t make it. The five groups along the X axis represent differing views on whether the government should reduce differences in income levels. The five columns within each group represent positions on whether gay and lesbian people should be allowed to live their lives free from government interference.

The graph is a little hard to follow (it was auto generated by the European Social Survey website.) It shows the probability of taking various positions on the question of whether government should leave gay and lesbian people alone by opinion on whether government should reduce differences in income level. I wanted to draw your attention to a curious bi-modality (pun intended). The two groups most likely to agree strongly with the rights of gays and lesbians are those who agree strongly with government intervention to reduce income differences and those who *disagree* strongly with government intervention to reduce income differences.

What about turning to another measure of cultural conservatism, views on immigration? 53% of those supporting government intervention to reduce income differences support the immigration of at least ‘some’ people who are not from the dominant culture. 52% of those opposing government intervention to reduce income differences feel likewise about immigration. No real difference.

There are some important limitations here. One of them is that a very large majority of people support the proposition that the government has some role in reducing differences in income, thus the small minority who disagree may not be a good stand-in for the right in general. Still, there’s something interesting to look at here. Honestly I’ve got to say that I really hope I’m wrong about this because it’s not especially compatible with my basically materialist class conflict focused view of human society.