The Monkey Cage

My colleague Pat Egan has produced some very interesting new research on the effect of court decisions on public opinion towards gay marriage along with Nathaniel Persily for Polling Report.com. For the work, they put together a dataset of over 50,000+ respondents from surveys from a variety of polling organizations over the past 20 years. Pat sent along the following highlights from their findings:

Although the Lawrence v. Texas decision — and the controversy over marriage that followed it — depressed public approval of same-sex marriage, the rate of increase in approval is virtually the same now is it was before the ruling. Support for same-sex marriage (we estimate it at about 42%) is now at its highest level ever. (Figure 1)

State court decisions in favor of same-sex marriage do not appear to cause any long-term backlash in state-level opinion:

• All states, regardless of whether they’ve had high court rulings in favor or against gay couples, have shown significant increases in support for gay marriage over the past 20 years.

• States in which same-sex marriage cases have reached high courts (regardless of the outcome of the ruling) have consistently been more supportive of same-sex marriage than those with no rulings. (Figure 2)

• If anything, the three states in which pro-gay court decisions have been in place the longest - MA, and NJ, VT - have exhibited steeper rises in approval of same-sex marriage than the national trend. (Figure 3)

For another good example of political scientists’ analysis of state-level public opinion data on gay rights, Egan and Persily suggest that MC readers see Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips’ forthcoming APSR article (ungated).