Individual Characteristics, State Context, and Mass Attitudes in the U.S. States: The Case of Gay Rights

Abstract

State governments are uniquely situated to educate their citizens on tolerance; not necessarily directly through traditional education or even civic education, however, but indirectly by passing tolerant policies that educate their citizens on acceptable actions and behaviors. State governments are in the best position to educate their citizens because, unlike the federal government, they are not too far removed from citizens so as to be considered impersonal but also not too close, like local governments, so as to be disregarded as unimportant or irrelevant.

Here, I analyze the relationship between public opinion and state-level policies toward the gay community. Specifically, using the ANES 2000-2002-2004 panel study, I model the relationship between individual characteristics, state characteristics, and attitudes toward the gay community as a multilevel growth model. Modeling attitudes in this way – as a function of individual and state characteristics – takes significant steps toward creating methodological models that are a closer reflection of reality than more traditional methods.

The results suggest that public perceptions of the gay community are strongly influenced by the policy position in the state. If a state has favorable policies toward the gay community, the citizens within that state will hold favorable attitudes toward the community, and vice versa. This implies that the state context has a nontrivial influence on individual citizen attitudes and that perhaps the traditional view of representation (citizens influence elites) may not hold in the realm of gay rights.