IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v41y2025i2p757-821..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Coming out in America: thirty years of cultural change

Author

Listed:
  • Raquel Fernández
  • Sahar Parsa
  • Martina Viarengo

Abstract

The last few decades witnessed a dramatic change in public opinion toward gay people. We show that this process was initiated by a sharp increase in the approval of same-sex relationships in 1992–93, following the debate on whether gay people could serve openly in the military. We study the hypothesis that the greater salience of gay-related issues during this period initiated a process of cultural change. Using a difference-in-difference empirical strategy, we show that greater exposure to the gay population, measured in a variety of ways, led to a greater increase in approval. Furthermore, media attention and campaign contributions increased by more in high exposure locations. Our results, we show, cannot be explained simply by a process of expanding liberal views of civil liberties.

Suggested Citation

  • Raquel Fernández & Sahar Parsa & Martina Viarengo, 2025. "Coming out in America: thirty years of cultural change," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 41(2), pages 757-821.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:41:y:2025:i:2:p:757-821.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewae010
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:41:y:2025:i:2:p:757-821.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.