Do laws shape attitudes? Evidence from same-sex relationship recognition policies in Europe
Introduction
Scholars have long recognized the importance of understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect societal attitudes (Downs 1957; Besley and Case, 2003, and others), but providing credible empirical evidence on this question has proven difficult. We present new evidence on this topic by using the gradual rollout of same-sex relationship recognition policies throughout Europe as plausibly exogenous policy variation to understand whether laws shape attitudes toward sexual minorities. Studying these policy changes is timely because advancements in civil rights for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals throughout Europe and the Americas have been some of the most striking social changes in recent decades. As recently as 2000, same-sex marriage was not legal in any European country; as of the time of this writing, same-sex couples can legally marry in 17 countries throughout Europe while same-sex registered domestic partnerships/civil unions are available in 12 other countries (Lipka and Masci, 2019). Fig. 1 shows that over this same period, the share of citizens who agree with the statement that “Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish” increased considerably – by about ten percentage points.
How might same-sex marriage and same-sex registered domestic partnership policies (henceforth: same-sex relationship recognition policies, or SSRRPs) affect attitudes toward sexual minorities? Flores and Barclay (2016) discuss four possibilities: backlash, legitimacy, polarization, and consensus. A backlash model predicts that attitudes toward LGB people might become substantially more negative following legal recognition of same-sex relationships, especially in the case of judicial rulings. A legitimacy model predicts that legal rulings may increase the acceptance and approval of LGB populations as laws increase social legitimacy. A polarization model predicts that focusing on events such as major same-sex relationship policies may reduce ambivalence toward LGB people and increase both social approval and disapproval of sexual minorities. Finally, a consensus model predicts that attitudes shape policy, but that policy has no effects on attitudes. These alternative hypotheses make clear that ultimately, the relationship between legal same-sex marriage and attitudes towards gay men and lesbians is an empirical question. We provide direct evidence on this question by using variation in the timing of the adoption of SSRRPs across a large set of European countries.
SSRRPs remain high on the policy agenda across the world, including in Australia, Europe, and Latin America. Understanding the impact of such policies on public attitudes is important for policymakers trying to gauge their social implications – particularly with respect to the risk of backlash and/or polarization. Our data allow us to examine whether relationship recognition policies have unintended negative effects on views toward sexual minorities for particular demographic groups such as men, rural populations, and religious individuals. Knowing whether there are adverse attitudinal effects for specific groups can help design policies to counterbalance any such spill-over effects from SSRRPs.
Our analysis uses data from the 2002–2016 European Social Surveys which asked over 325,000 individuals across Europe identically worded questions about a range of social and economic issues. Of interest is a specific question on whether the respondent agrees that “Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish.” We use cross-country variation in the timing of SSRRP adoption to estimate difference-in-differences models while controlling for individual demographic characteristics, country characteristics, other LGB policies (such as non-discrimination laws, adoption policies, and hate crimes legislation), country, year, and month fixed effects, and linear country-specific time trends.
We find that – consistent with a legitimacy model – laws significantly improve attitudes toward sexual minorities. The introduction of a relationship recognition law for same-sex couples is associated with a statistically significant 3.5 percentage point increase in the likelihood that a respondent agreed that gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish. This effect is about five percent of the baseline average. These results mean that the adoption of expanded relationship recognition policies for same-sex couples can explain 35 percent of the ten-percentage point increase over our sample period in the share of adults agreeing that gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish (Fig. 1). We also show that the effects of same-sex relationship policies are unique to LGB attitudes: there is no systematic relationship between these policies and people's views on other social and economic issues (such as attitudes toward other minority groups like immigrants). Moreover, we document that the effects we identify are widespread across many demographic groups. Finally, we show that the effects of SSRRPs are larger in countries with less gender equality, and within those relatively gender unequal societies the effects are larger among traditionally more conservative groups (less educated, partnered, rural, and religious individuals). This suggests that SSRRPs improved attitudes more for people that held more negative attitudes toward sexual minorities at the beginning of the sample period. Again, these patterns are broadly consistent with a legitimization model of attitudes.
Our results also illustrate the importance of accounting for time-invariant country-specific effects. Models that rely only on cross-sectional differences in the presence of SSRRPs across countries return associations between policies and attitudes that are three to ten times larger than our two-way fixed effects estimates. Thus, we find that policies both reflect and affect attitudes.
We proceed as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on same-sex relationship recognition policies and attitudes toward LGB people. Section 3 then describes the data and outlines our empirical approach. Section 4 presents the results after which Section 5 concludes.
Section snippets
Related literature
Our study is related to literature in economics and political science that examines the impact of significant legal and political events on public opinion in a variety of areas. For example, several papers have studied the shift in attitudes towards abortion following a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113) that ruled the US constitution protects a woman's right to have an abortion (Arney and Trescher, 1976; Uslaner and Weber, 1979; Ebaugh and Haney,
Data description and empirical approach
Our data on attitudes toward sexual minorities come from the 2002–2016 ESS. These surveys are fielded every year in over 30 European countries and include questions on a range of topics.4 Our main sample includes over 325,000 respondents, age 18 and older from 32 European countries.5
Descriptive statistics
We first present descriptive statistics for the policy variables, LGB attitudes, and individual demographic characteristics in Table 1.10
Discussion and conclusion
Do laws shape attitudes? Or do they simply reflect them? We provide evidence that cross-country variation in policies toward sexual minorities reflects attitudes of the citizenry but also that such policies do have real effects in terms of shaping attitudes. Over our sample period, 13 European countries adopted relationship recognition policies for same-sex couples. Our 2002–2016 data return evidence that such policies significantly improved attitudes toward sexual minorities. We also show that
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for helpful comments from Nathan Anderson, Marcus Dillender, Sergei Guriev, Cindy Kam, Berkay Ozcan, Daniel Treisman, Nathaniel Young, and conference and seminar participants at Vanderbilt University, the 2018 AEA/ASSA meetings, the 2017 CREST/IZA/OECD Conference on Discrimination, and the 2017 APPAM Fall Research Conference. Results do not imply an endorsement from the EBRD or any other organization. All interpretations, errors, and omissions are our own.
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Aksoy is a Principal Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a part-time Assistant Professor of Economics at King's College London, and a Research Associate at the London School of Economics and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Carpenter is a Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. De Haas is Director of Research at the EBRD, a CEPR Research Fellow and a part-time Associate Professor of Finance at Tilburg University.Tran is a Ph.D. student in economics at DIW Berlin.