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Is Same-Sex Marriage Legislation Related to Attitudes Toward Homosexuality?

Trends in Tolerance of Homosexuality in European Countries Between 2002 and 2010

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Abstract

Since 2001, various Western countries have accorded legal recognition to same-sex marriages, but thus far, we lack information on how this legislation is related to trends in public opinion. In most of the literature, declining levels of prejudice toward homosexuality are found to result from structural social processes (rising education, secularization, and detraditionalization), which should occur in all industrialized societies, with or without same-sex marriage. In this article, we analyze data of the five waves of the European Social Survey for the period 2002–2010. Results show that levels of prejudice are significantly lower in countries that recognize same-sex marriage, while levels are only slightly lower in countries with some form of registered partnership for gay and lesbian couples. Therefore, we can assume that same-sex marriage is indeed an issue affecting public opinion and public policy.

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Notes

  1. The results of the multilevel model are similar if we included Israel and Turkey in the sample.

  2. Number of participating countries in ESS for each round: 2002: 22 countries, 2004: 25 countries, 2006: 23 countries, 2008: 27 countries, and 2010: 26 countries. Italy, Luxemburg, and Croatia only participated in two rounds of the ESS. Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and the Russian Federation participated in three rounds of the ESS. Czech Republic, Greece, Ukraine, Estonia, and Slovakia participated in four rounds of the ESS. Finally, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, UK, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, and France participated in five rounds of the ESS.

  3. It has to be noted that in our final multilevel model, this level of significance is not reached. This is due to the fact that in this figure, we limit ourselves to the countries with five ESS observation points (mostly countries in North-West Europe), while for the multilevel analysis, we used all countries with at least two ESS observations (including more Central and Eastern European countries).

  4. We also controlled for the importance of religion at the aggregate country-level, but the effect was not significant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Citizenship and Democracy, Park Street 45, 3th Floor, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Marc Hooghe & Cecil Meeusen

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  1. Marc Hooghe
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  2. Cecil Meeusen
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Correspondence to Marc Hooghe.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 2 Descriptive statistics of analysis variables
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Appendix 2

Table 3 Final multilevel model with GDP per capita
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Hooghe, M., Meeusen, C. Is Same-Sex Marriage Legislation Related to Attitudes Toward Homosexuality?. Sex Res Soc Policy 10, 258–268 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-013-0125-6

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