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Determinants of Electoral Support for Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendments: An Examination of Ballot Issues in California and Florida

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Abstract

Between 1998 and 2006, twenty-seven states amended their constitutions to prohibit same sex marriage. The 2008 elections again saw three states with ballot measures aimed at banning gay marriage. This study examines the determinants of support for those measures in California and Florida, and includes a similar measure placed on the primary election ballot in California in 2000. Support is measured as the county-wide vote in favor of each gay marriage ban. A number of hypotheses are explored that examine the urban/rural nature of each county, as well as the political and demographic characteristics of county residents. It is suggested that states may be best viewed as relatively independent groupings of diverse subcultures, rather than as homogenous populations with a single political culture. The findings reported here indicate that a host of demographic, political and religious differences within each state influence residents’ votes on gay marriage bans.

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Notes

  1. Tolerance scores were calculated for all independent variables to test for problems with multicollinearity. With the exception of the income and education variables, which were combined into the SES variable, and the variable measuring adherents to all congregations, all variables included in the models had scores above 0.3 (with most above 0.4), indicating no significant problems existed. The variable measuring the percentage of adherents to all congregations was strongly correlated with the percent Catholic variable in California, creating problems with multicollinearity. To correct this problem, the percentage of adherents to all congregations variable was removed from both California models. Further, the reader should be aware of arithmetic transformations that were done on five variables to comply with the assumptions of the OLS model. The urban/rural and age variables in California, and the age, urban/rural and percent adherents variables in Florida all suffered from kurtosis (specifically leptokurtosis), to degrees that violated the normality assumption. To correct this problem, Log-base 10 transformations were conducted on these variables. While these transformations will not affect the measures of influence between the dependent variables and each independent variable, the reader should be aware of these transformations when interpreting the parameter estimates reported in Tables 1 and 2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT, 06226, USA

    William M. Salka

  2. Department of Journalism, SSPA024, California State University at Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA, 90840, USA

    Raymond Christopher Burnett

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  1. William M. Salka
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  2. Raymond Christopher Burnett
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Correspondence to Raymond Christopher Burnett.

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Salka, W.M., Burnett, R.C. Determinants of Electoral Support for Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendments: An Examination of Ballot Issues in California and Florida. Sexuality & Culture 16, 59–75 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9099-9

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