My colleague “Pat Egan”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/PatrickEgan.html has produced some very interesting new research on the effect of court decisions on “public opinion towards gay marriage”:http://www.pollingreport.com/penp0908.htm along with “Nathaniel Persily”:http://www.law.columbia.edu/fac/Nathaniel_Persily for “Polling Report.com”:http://www.pollingreport.com/index.html. 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:
bq. 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)
bq. 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”:http://www.columbia.edu/~jrl2124/Lax_Phillips_Gay_Policy_Responsiveness_2009.pdf).