Gay Politics Goes Mainstream: Democrats, Republicans, and Same-Sex Relationships

Fernández, Raquel and Sahar Parsa

No 16382, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Attitudes towards same-sex relationships in the US have changed radically over a relatively short period of time. After remaining fairly constant for over two decades, opinions became more favorable starting in 1992 - a presidential election year in which the Democratic and Republican parties took opposing stands over the status of gay people in society. What roles did political parties and their leaders play in this process of cultural change? Using a variety of techniques including machine learning, we show that the partisan opinion gap emerged substantially prior to 1992 -- in the mid 1980s -- and did not increase as a result of the political debates in 1992-'93. Furthermore, we identify people with a college-and-above education as the potential "leaders" of the process of partisan divergence.

Keywords: Public opinion; Cultural change; Lgbtq attitudes; Political parties; Heterogeneous effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P16 Z1 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16382 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16382

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16382

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().