sum[ "I preliminarily find that about 13% of social change is due to demographic shifts in the public, about 12% of social change is due to changes in the proportion of the public that knows gays and lesbians, about 18% of change is due to changes in public attribution of homosexuality, and about 58% of social change is due to elite polarization, television news stories relating to gays and lesbians, and, particularly, the increase in gay and lesbian television characters."]
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1. Garretson, Jeremiah. "Why Social Change?: Social Contact, Attribution, Television, and the Liberalization of Public Opinion towards Gays." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Hotel Intercontinental, New Orleans, LA, Jan 07, 2009
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Continuity tends to characterize political attitudes (Page and Shapiro 1992). Parents tend to transmit their opinions to their offspring (Jennings and Niemi 1968, 1974). Given these conceptions, why have attitudes towards lesbians and gays liberalized in recent years? Several causes of opinion change on attitudes towards homosexuality have been proposed, including demographic shifts (Loftus 2001), increases in social contacts with gays (Lewis 2007), elite polarization (Carmines and Stimson 1990), changes in the attribution of homosexuality (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2008), and para-social or media contact with gays and lesbians via news or fictional television (Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes 2006). I use two overtime pooled datasets to estimate the proportion of social change due to each of these variables via multi-level modeling. Based on the cumulative general social survey and a set of nine pooled surveys that each ask respondents if they know gays or lesbians and their opinion on the causes of homosexuality, I preliminarily find that about 13% of social change is due to demographic shifts in the public, about 12% of social change is due to changes in the proportion of the public that knows gays and lesbians, about 18% of change is due to changes in public attribution of homosexuality, and about 58% of social change is due to elite polarization, television news stories relating to gays and lesbians, and, particularly, the increase in gay and lesbian television characters. 2010-03-03