Drivers and Trends in the Equality of Opportunity for Sexual and Gender Minorities : A Panel Approach

This paper examines the long-run evolution of de jure legal inclusion for sexual and gender minorities and analyzes its structural and institutional drivers. The study used the Equality of Opportunity for Sexual and Gender Minorities measurement framework to construct a panel data set of 133 legal and policy questions for 64 countries from 1961 to 2024. Feature-based time-series clustering identifies three trajectories: limited progress, reversals, and low inclusion; gradual improvement and moderate inclusion; and accelerated progress and high inclusion. Legal inclusion for sexual and gender minorities has risen faster since the late 1990s, but the gains have been uneven across countries and domains, with weaker progress in hate-crime protections and varying outcomes in decriminalization. The paper uses panel data models to examine the drivers of legal inclusion. The estimates identify participatory democracy and interpersonal globalization as positive drivers of higher levels of legal inclusion for sexual and gender minorities, with domain-level results showing that these drivers have operated unevenly across services, labor markets, civil and political inclusion, and hate-crime protections. The economic development channel has played a more limited role, appearing mainly in the services and social protection domain. Colonial condition–legal system classifications have mattered most for the decriminalization domain, where inherited penal provisions have directly shaped the persistence of legal exclusion. Overall, the results suggest that legal reform should respond to countries’ trajectories, domain-specific gaps, and inherited legal constraints, rather than relying on income growth as a substitute for rights-based legal change.