Rights for Same-Sex Couples and Public Attitudes toward Gays and Lesbians in Europe

In this paper we investigate how changes in LGBT policies affect individual attitudes towards gays and lesbians. Although the politics of LGBT rights have become a topic of increased attention within political science and political sociology, only very few studies so far have investigated the potential feedback effects from policy change in this area on individual attitudes. All of them are limited to the US context. From a theoretical perspective policy change in this area could potentially affect attitudes in two diverging ways. First, more in line with the broader literature on feedback effects, liberalization of LGBT policies should lead to broader acceptance and more positive attitudes towards LGBT people. On the other hand, a literature on the possibilities of restrictive backlash argues that policy liberalization will lead people who are against the changes of the status quo to radicalize their opinion against such measures. We empirically test these propositions using a novel data set combining data on LGBT rights reforms with individual attitudes from six rounds of the European Social Survey. This datasets thus allows us to exploit time-series cross-section variation in over 20 European countries in a period from 2002 until 2012 – the period where a large share of liberalization took place.