Does Changing Media Change Minds? : TV, Partisanship, and Shifting Public Opinion Towards Lesbians and Gays
Continuity tends to characterize political attitudes (Page and Shapiro 1992) with parents tending to transmit their opinions to their offspring (Jennings and Niemi 1968, 1974). Given these orthodox conceptions, why have attitudes towards lesbians and gays liberalized in recent years? Using the cumulative general social survey and a pooled set of survey data that asks respondents if they know gays or lesbians and their opinions on the innateness of homosexuality over two decades, I show that the clarification of partisan positions on lesbian and gay rights during the 1992 presidential campaign in addition to the rise in lesbian and gay television characters in the mid-1990s explain why opinion liberalization occurred during the 1990s. Period effects created by systematic changes in the media and filtered by partisanship dominate all other potential causes of the shift in public opinion. Half of the change explained by the model is due to the media's period effects, about an eighth of the change is explained by the rise in the opinion that gays are born gay or cannot change, while an eighth of the change is due to an increase in reported contact with lesbians and gays
Year of publication: |
2010
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Authors: | Garretson, Jeremiah |
Publisher: |
[2010]: [S.l.] : SSRN |
Subject: | Öffentliche Meinung | Public opinion | Homosexualität | Homosexuality |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
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