Attitudes Towards LGBT Individuals After bostock v. Clayton County: Evidence From a Quasi Experiment

• Author: Jack Thompson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211068052
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2022, Vol. 75(4) 1374–1385

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211068052

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Attitudes Towards LGBT Individuals After

bostock v. Clayton County: Evidence From

a Quasi Experiment

Jack Thompson

Abstract

Do United States Supreme Court decisions on LGBT rights shape attitudes towards LGBT indivi duals among the mass

public? In this paper, I conduct an empirical test of the effect of quasi-random exposure to the announcement of Bos tock

v. Clayton County—a landmark case which held that an employer who f‌ires their employee because of their sexual

orientation or gender identity violates Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—on favorability towards LGBT individuals.

Relying on data from Phase 2 of the Democracy Fund/UCLA Nationscape survey, I f‌ind that quasi-random exposure to

the announcement of Bostock engendered increases in favorability towards LGBT individuals among the wider American

public. Subgroup analyses also indicate that the largest increases in favorability were among Democratic partisans and the

religiously unaff‌iliated, while minimal changes in favorability were detected among those who are among the most likely

to oppose LGBT rights, including Republicans and Evangelical Protestants. The f‌indings speak to the validity of the

legitimacy model and highlight the limitations of the backlash model in the post-Obergefell era of pub lic opinion towards

LGBT rights.

Keywords

Supreme court, LGBT rights, public opinion

Introduction

On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court held in a landmark

civil rights case—Bostock v.Clayton County

1

—that an

employer who f‌ires their employee because of their sexual

orientation or gender identity violates Section VII of the

1964 Civil Rights Act. Following cases such as Lawrence

v. Texas (2003), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Bo-

stock was widely seen as another watershed moment in

further enshrining LGBT rights (Liptak, 2020,Millhiser,

2020). In addition to understanding how policy devel-

opment leads to greater social benef‌its for LGBT indi-

viduals (Flores et al. 2020), scholars have analyzed how

Supreme Court decisions on LGBT rights shape attitudes

towards LGBT individuals among the mass public

(Aksoy, Carpenter, Haas & Tran, 2020,Stoutenborough,

Haider-Markel & Allen, 2006). Despite these studies,

scholars interested in the effects of policy development on

mass attitudes have not yet examined whether policy gains

on protections from discrimination in employment may lead

to more favorable estimations of LGBT individuals among

the wider public. Public policy is often used as a strategic

tool to change mass opinion (Soss & Schram, 2007), and the

public’s response to the introduction of policy is known as

policy feedback (Kreitzer, Hamilton, and Tolbert, 2014). To

what extent then do competing models of mass opinion

change explain public attitudes towards LGBT individuals

after the announcement of Bostock? This paper tests the

possibility that Bostock shaped public attitudes towards

LGBT individuals with a novel research design and the use

of timely data.

Demand-side models of public policy have longed

examined how mass opinion shapes policy development

(Baumgartner and Jones, 2010). These traditional models

hold that policy development is responsive to public at-

titudes towards a given issue (Page and Shapiro, 1983).

Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Replication data for this article may be found at: https://dataverse.

harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/MFRYYK

Corresponding Author:

Jack Thompson, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory

Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK.

Email: j.thompson4@exeter.ac.uk