To Know You is Not Necessarily to Love You: The Partisan Mediators of Intergroup Contact

A Jstor search of the term "intergroup contact" within the political science journals produces over 400 citations. For an extensive list of citations, we direct interested readers to Pettigrew and Tropp's (2006) meta-analysis of the literature on intergroup contact.

Threat theories tend to be based on the idea of proximity without meaningful contact; of especial relevance to the discussion is the distinction that Hero and Tolbert (1996) propose between bifurcated and heterogeneous diversity. In our data, over 90 % of respondents report having a gay relative, friend, co-worker or acquaintance. In order for threat responses to be induced, theory argues that the “threatening” population is sizable and geographically proximate, but that in-group members report little to no interaction with these groups. Our data plainly indicate that most straight people have some interaction with the LGBT population.

It is of course important to note, however, that there also may be differences in the way people view individuals who identify as gay and how they feel about gay rights. As Brown and Henriquez (2011, 462) note, “people’s attitudes toward homosexuality may not necessarily reflect how they feel about civil rights for gays and lesbians.”

Druckman et al. (2012) show that attitude stability is extraordinarily strong. People dogmatically adhere to opinions they form in response to early frames from media and elites that are present at the beginning of attitude formation on a specific issue. People appear not only resistant to later frames, but they exert considerable bias in the information they seek. These new results suggest that the messages that the public receives at t1 from their elites can offset the effects we might expect from repeated future contact with out-groups if the frame from elites was sufficiently clear and negative. Since people do not live under experimental “white room” conditions, the information they receive at t1 should be subject to their political and social preferences at that time.

For example, the Democratic National Platform in 2004 made the following statement in regard to same-sex marriage: “We support full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and seek equal responsibilities, benefits, and protections for these families. In our country, marriage has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there. We repudiate President Bush's divisive effort to politicize the Constitution by pursuing a "Federal Marriage Amendment." Our goal is to bring Americans together, not drive them apart” (DNC 2004) and in 2008, the Democratic Party Platform noted, “We support the full inclusion of all families, including same-sex couples, in the life of our nation, and support equal responsibility, benefits, and protections. We will enact a comprehensive bipartisan employment non-discrimination act. We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act and all attempts to use this issue to divide us” (DNC 2008).

Several studies have included political controls in their models of attitudes toward gays and/or support for gay rights, however, none that we could find have done any analysis of subgroups to see if the results only hold for different political groups within the sample. Given that these studies uniformly show that Republicans and ideologically conservative individuals are more homophobic, have more stereotypes about gays and are less supportive of gay rights policies (e.g. Becker and Scheufele 2011; Wood and Bartkowski 2004; Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz 2012; Overby and Barth 2001), this type of analysis is certainly warranted.

Of course, one potential outcome of the “threatening” rhetoric used by the Republican Party against gay marriage is that it would be possible to see that individuals that have increased contact with the gay community would become more supportive of a ban on gay marriage (e.g. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz 2012).

That said our measure of contact still leaves much to be desired. We are not able to address how frequent contact is with the gay person or how many gay people the respondent knows, both of which would further our ability to grasp the extent to which the respondent has meaningful contact with the LGBT community. Additionally, we cannot measure if the respondent knows a gay couple, which has shown to have a stronger impact on attitudes toward same sex marriage than knowing a single member of the LGBT community (Barth and Parry 2009). However, Lewis (2011, 228) finds that “knowing LGBs in any capacity has an impact” on support for gay rights.

We subsequently will consider some alternatives to this operationalization.

Following the literature to date, we expect whites, females, those with higher incomes, younger respondents, more educated respondents, liberals, and those who do not identify as born again Christians to be more supportive of same-sex marriage (e.g. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz 2012; Bramlett 2012; Lewis 2009; Barth et al. 2009; Overby and Barth 2002; Wilcox and Wolpert 2000; Herek 1994).

In our data Republicans report just as much contact with the gay community as Democrats: 92.28 % of Republicans (combining Strong Republicans, Weak Republicans and Leaners) and 92.22 % of Democrats report having some form of contact with a member of the gay community. Across all forms of contact, Democrats and Republicans appear to be almost identical. Republicans are more likely to say they have a gay acquaintance and Democrats are more likely to report having a gay friend; however, the having a gay coworker and family member are indistinguishable.

See appendix for coding of awareness and interest.

Lewis (2011) also finds that the effect of contact does not vary by Party Identification. Importantly though the vast majority of the surveys that Lewis employs were prior to the position taking by the Republican and Democratic Parties. This is further evidence that it is cues that drive the results we see here.