Coming Out in America: AIDS, Politics, and Cultural Change

Raquel Fernández (), Sahar Parsa () and Martina Viarengo
Additional contact information
Raquel Fernández: New York University
Sahar Parsa: Tufts University

No 12360, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The last few decades witnessed a dramatic change in public opinion towards gay people. This paper studies the hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic was a shock that changed the incentive to "come out" and that the ensuing process of mobilization and endogenous political process led to cultural transformation. We show that the process of change was discontinuous over time and present suggestive evidence that the 1992 presidential election followed by the "don't ask, don't tell" debate led to a change in attitudes. Using a difference-in-difference empirical strategy, we find that, in accordance with our hypothesis, the change in opinion was greater in states with higher AIDS rates. Our analysis suggests that if individuals in low-AIDS states had experienced the same average AIDS rate as a high-AIDS state, the change in their approval rate from the '70s to the '90s would have been 50 percent greater.

Keywords: AIDS epidemic; LGBT attitudes; public opinion; party politics; presidential elections; cultural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 P16 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published - published online as 'Coming out in America: thirty years of cultural change' in: Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 18 April 2024

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12360.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Coming Out in America: AIDS, Politics, and Cultural Change (2019)
Working Paper: Coming out in America: AIDS, Politics, and Cultural Change (2019)
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:iza:izadps:dp12360

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().