Community Context, Personal Contact, and Support for an Anti—Gay Rights Referendum

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912908317033
• Published date: 01 June 2009
• Author: Jay Barth,Scott H. Huffmon,L. Marvin Overby
• Date: 01 June 2009
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

Volume 62 Number 2

June 2009 355-365

© 2009 University of Utah

10.1177/1065912908317033

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355

Community Context, Personal Contact,

and Support for an Anti–Gay Rights

Referendum

Jay Barth

Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas

L. Marvin Overby

University of Missouri, Columbia

Scott H. Huffmon

Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina

Using data from an unusual survey,we gauge factors influencing support for a state anti–gay rights referendum. After con-

trolling for other powerful predictors of attitudes, we find personal contact (especially relevant and voluntary contact) has

an important impact on public support, although community context does not. These findings support an integrated notion

of interactions with “out” groups, grounded in social categorization theory, that sees community context and interpersonal

contact as concentric circles, moving from abstract, detached forms of contact to more pronounced, personal forms.

However, even among those with substantial interpersonal contact, support for the referendum was still widespread.

Keywords: gay rights; contact hypothesis; same-sex marriages

While the legal status of gays and lesbians remains

hotly contested, there is considerable evidence

that Americans are increasingly comfortable with

homosexuality (Wilcox and Norrander 2002). Various

explanations have been offered for this shift in public

opinion, most prominently the venerable contact

hypothesis (Allport 1954), which posits that contact

between different groups is erosive of prejudice. Both

experiments and surveys have shown that personal

contact with gays and lesbians tends to have an ame-

liorative effect on attitudes toward homosexuals.

Recently, we (Overby and Barth 2002) have also

demonstrated that context matters; citizens living in

areas with higher gay populations demonstrate warmer

attitudes toward homosexuals.

Although the findings from the gay interpersonal

contact literature are very much in line with the sim-

ilar literature on race, the same is not true for our con-

textual findings. In a review of the literature on

interracial personal contact, Forbes (1997) found that

some 90 percent of studies reported positive effects.

In contrast, the literature on racial context is much

more mixed. A long line of literature dating back to

Key (1949) has found that whites who live in close

proximity to blacks tend to have a more negative

disposition to them. The impact of context on attitudes

toward other ethnic and racial minorities, particularly

Asians and Latinos, is more ambiguous, although

most studies have found either null or modestly neg-

ative effects (Stein, Post, and Rinden 2000).

In this article, we explore more deeply the relative

impacts of personal contact and community context

in terms of attitudes toward gays and lesbians,

grounding this examination in social categorization

theory. In doing so, we make use of an unusual sur-

vey of public opinion regarding a 2006 referendum in

South Carolina to enshrine a ban on same-sex mar-

riages in the state constitution. Unlike previous studies,

these data provide us with measures both of personal

Jay Barth, Associate Professor of Politics, Hendrix College; e-mail:

barth@hendrix.edu.

L. Marvin Overby, Professor of Political Science, University of

Missouri; e-mail: overby@missouri.edu.

Scott H. Huffmon, Associate Professor of Political Science,

Winthrop University; e-mail: huffmons@winthrop.edu.

Authors’ Note: The authors gratefully acknowledge the assis-

tance of Lane Lovegrove of Winthrop University’s Social and

Behavioral Research Lab in data collection and management.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2007 annual

meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and the

2007 annual meeting of the Political Studies Association.