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Between 2023 and 2025, the United States experienced an unprecedented surge in anti-LGBTQ legislation. While prior research has documented the scope and mental health consequences of this legislative wave, how restrictions are bundled and structured across legislative agendas remains poorly understood. This study applies two-mode social network analysis to examine how policy topics co-occur and cluster within bills, and whether states sharing the same geographic region or political ideology introduce similar topic portfolios (regional and ideological homophily).
Methods
This study uses a dataset of 1,596 anti-LGBTQ bills drawn from the ACLU legislative tracker between 2023 and 2025, yielding 3,233 bill–topic edges across 22 policy topics. Using social network analysis, a two-mode (bipartite) network was constructed linking bills to policy topics. Three measures were calculated: degree centrality (number of distinct co-occurring topics per topic), eigenvector centrality (a topic's connectedness to other well-connected topics), and topic co-occurrence via one-mode projection. Topic clustering was performed using the Louvain modularity algorithm. State-level agenda diversity was assessed by counting distinct policy topics introduced per state. Using U.S. Census region as the indicator of geographic proximity and Cook Political Report Partisan Voting Index (PVI) as the indicator of ideological alignment, state-level homophily was assessed using pairwise Jaccard similarity and permutation tests.
Results
State-level agenda diversity varied substantially, with Texas introducing the broadest portfolio (20 distinct topics) and several northeastern states introducing five or fewer. Education-related restrictions, particularly restricting student and educator rights, dominated the network across all measures: highest frequency (n = 688), degree centrality (20), and eigenvector centrality (1.000), serving as the structural core of contemporary anti-LGBTQ legislative agendas. Four coherent policy clusters were identified, reflecting distinct legislative logics: (1) school governance and public accommodation restrictions, (2) healthcare access restrictions, (3) civil rights and legal definitions rollback, and (4) expression and performance censorship. The strongest co-occurring topic pair was other school restrictions and restricting student and educator rights (n = 190 bills), followed by healthcare age restrictions and healthcare restrictions (n = 179). Homophily analysis revealed that both geographic and ideological alignment were associated with greater legislative similarity, but ideological homophily was stronger: states sharing PVI category showed higher topic portfolio overlap (mean Jaccard = 0.539; p < 0.0002) than states sharing Census region (mean Jaccard = 0.514; p = 0.0008).
Conclusions and Implications
This study demonstrates that anti-LGBTQ legislative agendas across U.S. states are coordinated and ideologically structured. Findings highlight schools as the primary institutional target of anti-LGBTQ legislative activity. For social work practitioners and advocates, these results underscore the need to address anti-LGBTQ legislation as a systemic, coordinated agenda rather than isolated bills. Advocacy efforts targeting single bills or single domains may be insufficient without attention to the cross-state legislative agenda driving them. Future research should extend this framework longitudinally to identify bellwether states that drive legislative diffusion, and examine how federal policy context shapes state legislative agendas.