Draft Prospectus:

Social Change in Mass Opinion: Its Origins, Dynamics, and How to Accelerate It

By Jeremiah J. Garretson
Social change is ubiquitous in society today. In 1996, less than one third of the public supported
same-sex marriage. Today, over two out of every three Americans support same-sex marriage.
Fifteen years ago, only 41% of the public believed that immigration strengthens the United States.
By 2017, the Gallup poll had found that percentage had risen to 64%. 80% of the public in 1996
supported a ban on the sale of assault weapons. By 2016 that percentage had dropped to 51%.
Gallup has found that support for the legalization of cannabis has increased by 40% since the
1990s. In all cases, younger people were the vanguard of these changes.

Why do cultural and social issues see shifts in collective preferences across time, while
preferences on other public policy issues do not (Page and Shapiro 1992)? What is the role of
social movements and media in initiating these changes? Why do younger people adopt attitudes
different from their parents on these issues but not others? What is role of mass culture and
‘tipping points’ in the process of change and how do these ‘tipping points’ cascade into
largescale social transformation? Why does social change affect both those who watch news
coverage and those who completely avoid it?

Social Change in Mass Opinion: Its Origins, Dynamics, and How to Accelerate It answers these
questions by showing that these issues---which appear to be unrelated---have common
characteristics that set them apart from other issues. The central story of this book is simple.
Media and culture matter. Social connections matter. The book demonstrates that social change
in mass opinion is driven by interpersonal persuasion from those in close contact with people
whose lives are affected by these issues. However, people whose lives are interconnected with
these issues: LGBTQ rights, drugs, guns, and immigration, feel a deep stigma sharing those
aspects of their lives with others. The public is open to persuasion on these issues from friends
and family members because of these social connections, but the stigma associated with these
issues prevents them from advocating for themselves. Yet, when a random event starts a shift in
culture, it causes a positive shift in the way the media discusses an issue. This shift in tone grows
and begins a process that destigmatizes these individuals. Those, who formerly felt only fear that
their lives and preferences would leave them socially isolated, increasingly begin to advocate for
themselves and share their positions within their social networks. Societies change, and mass
opinion is transformed in the wake of this sharing.

Table 1 demonstrates our current academic understanding of the characteristics of public opinion
on most political issues, contrasted with the distinctive characteristics of what pollsters have
observed about public opinion on social or cultural issues. The research in this book explains
several of the distinctive aspects of public opinion on social and cultural issues with a unified
theory. Rather than these aspects of attitudinal change on issues of race, gender, sexuality,
immigration, and drugs being ‘exceptions’ to more general findings, social and cultural issues
can easily be explained by an alternative set of opinion change processes that have, until now,
gone unrecognized. Social Change in Mass Opinion explains why attitudinal change has
occurred on these diverse issues by showing that this destigmatization process is the common
thread uniting them.

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 Table 1: Unexplained Differences in Mass Opinion Between Political and Social/Cultural
Issues

Political/Policy Issues Social/Cultural Issues

Examples Medicare; Social Racial Equality; Gender
Security; Education; Equality; LGBTQ Rights;
Healthcare; Size and Immigration;
Scope of Government Marijuana; Gun Control
Change in Collective Preferences Uncommon Common
(Page and Shapiro 1992)
Generational Gaps in Attitudes Uncommon Common
(Jennings and Niemi 1981)
Largest Predictor of Attitudes Party Identification Ideological
Identification
Level of 'Unexplained Preference Moderate High
Stablility' (Converse 1964;
Lauderdale, Hanretty, and Vivyan
2018)

The Role of News and Entertainment/Cultural Media in Catalyzing Social Change

The role of the media in this process needs to be emphasized also. Small changes in society and
politics, like a new presidential administration or a Supreme Court decision, can disrupt the ways
that media and social movements and their members in the mass public respond to these issues.
As news and political media start to cover seemingly random events, like the election of a
president who endorses LGBTQ rights or admits to past felony marijuana use, the political status
quo on the issue becomes disrupted and the possibility of change triggered. Those who care
about the issue begin to feel emboldened and take to mass media. For example, in 2008, the
election of Barack Obama emboldened both those who supported liberalization of cannabis laws
and those opposed to measures restricting the use of firearms initiating social change on these
issues.

What may begin as a discussion of the politics surrounding a specific cultural or social issue
spills over into other forms of media. For example, on LGBTQ rights, discussions of AIDS in
1992 and gays in the military in 1993 cascaded into increased portrayals of LGBTQ people on
fictional television in the mid-1990s. The election of Obama, who was thought to be more
favorable to marijuana legalization, was quickly followed by a proliferation of reality shows
focusing on the medical cannabis industries in Colorado and California. Marijuana use began to
be depicted as safe on adult cartoon shows such as South Park and Family Guy.

As this cultural shift or ‘tipping point’ happens, the destigmatization process begins. Formerly
hidden aspects of people’s lives: undocumented immigration status; homosexuality; drug use;

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and other such behaviors become visible to trusted family members and friends. This is the
process through which social change in mass opinion unfolds.

Why it Matters: Social Change and the Dynamics of Public Opinion

This sequence does not take places on most political issues---those involving economic
redistribution or the size and scope of government. If social issues all experience change due to
similar factors, and these factors distinguish them as a class, why is it that public opinion
research has not found these commonalities in the past? As mentioned briefly above, public
opinion researchers have tended to focus on political/policy issues such as the economy and how
they relate to partisanship and voting behavior (Mutz 1998). Existing research suggests that these
issues exhibit little change in aggregate preferences over time (Page and Shapiro 1992). Attitudes
among younger people are largely the same as their parents on such issues (Jennings and Niemi
1981). The largest predictor of positions on such issues is partisanship, and partisanship is
largely passed from parent to child (Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes 1960).

When attitudes on political issues do change, it is largely due to an intense focus within news and
political media on the issue in response to a current event or other political or scientific
development (Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey 1989). Because only a small, highly educated, and
older segment of the population tends to be interested in politics (and watch news and political
media (Patterson 2007)), attitudinal change on these issues tends to be short lived and of small
magnitude. Even among those that watch the news, strong liberals and conservatives are likely to
only view media consistent with their political predispositions and to process new considerations
in ways that reinforce preferences rather than challenge old views (Taber and Lodge 2006;
Lodge and Taber 2013; Levendusky 2013). This deck is thus highly stacked against attitude
change on political issues. After partisanship and ideology are controlled for, the orthodoxy in
the public opinion literatue is that peoples’ stated views on political issues are largely random
(Converse 1964; Lauderdale, Hanretty, and Vivyan 2018). These findings have formed an
orthodoxy, and issues that have not fit this set of results have been viewed as singular
‘exceptions’, such as mass opinion on race, gender, and sexuality.

However, as the research in this book makes clear, social issues largely violate this orthodoxy at
nearly every point. Mass preferences on social/cultural issues respond to fundamentally different
phenomenon in addition to those felt on political/policy issues. While studies on American’s
racial attitudes, attitudes toward immigrants, and views on the rights of LGBTQ people are
common (Gilens 1999; Kellstedt 2003; Sanders and Kinder 1996; Garretson 2018), no book has
focused exclusively on determining why cultural issues, as a group, exhibit social change as
compared to political issues. The core of the public opinion literature’s narrow focus on political
and policy issues, and the labeling of cultural and social issues as ‘exceptions’ to be explored on
a case-by-case basis at the discipline’s periphery has left this consistency unrecognized.

Framework and Chapter Outline

The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 to 2) introduces the empirical
puzzles that cultural issues represent to our understanding of American public opinion and
provides background on the politics surrounding the cases studies in the book (LGBTQ Rights,
immigration, marijuana legalization, and, on the right, opposition to gun control). The second
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part (chapters 3 to 6) uses historical survey data to illustrate the common mechanisms and
characteristics of mass opinion on these issues and the dynamics of change in mass opinion
change on each. The last part of the book moves beyond the study of cultural issues and explores
how preference change on these issues have affected politics in early 21st century in the United
States (chapters 7-8). A special emphasis is placed on how social change has affected the politics
of the millennial generation and shifted them to the left of American politics.

Chapter 1: Social Change in Mass Opinion: Commonalities, Patterns, and Puzzles

Social and cultural change in mass opinion is ubiquitous. The book opens discussing instances of
largescale change in mass preferences since 1920 with a survey of issues on which the American
public appears to have changed their minds on, collectively. In the second half of the 20th
century, attitudes on the proper roles of racial groups and women in society changed
dramatically. From the 1990s to today, support for LGBTQ rights, marijuana legalization, and
immigration have all increased. On the right, support for restrictions on the sale of firearms have
dropped considerable since the 1980s. It is the ability of the public to change their minds on
these issues that sets these issues apart.

Why do attitudes change on cultural issues, but not on other issues? The public opinion literature
provides no answers to this question. The reality of these changes is contrasted with the lack of
change in politics and on attitudes directly relating to the ongoing conflict between Democrats
and Republicans: beliefs in the size and scope of government, economic policy, and spending on
social programs like social security and Medicare (see Table 1). The public opinion literature,
largely developed to provide an understanding of the permanent stasis seen on these political
issues, is inadequate when it comes to explaining how largescale, gradual change is possible on
any issue.

After concluding that cultural issues are ill explained by current theory, I outline why cultural
issues evolve differently. Individuals learn about cultural issues not only from the news and
politics, but also from mass culture such as entertainment media. Only individuals who follow
politics are susceptible to change on political issues, but on cultural issues---LGBTQ rights,
marijuana, guns, immigration---citizens can learn about new considerations on these from mass
culture---and from those in their social network who care about these issues if those individuals
are willing to share their experiences. The chapter ends with an outline of the book.

Chapter 2: A Unified Theory of Social Change in Mass Opinion

Cultural issues are fundamentally different from social issues because citizens experience and
learn about these issues from non-political sources. This forms the core of the theory as to why
attitudes on cultural issues and political issues follow different paths. The chapter opens with a
discussion of what we know about issue-based public opinion with an emphasis on the sources of
considerations that change people’s opinions on these issues: the news; various other forms of
media; personal experiences; and interpersonal influence.

Finding our existing knowledge of change in mass opinion inadequate to explain cultural issues
and social change, the chapter then derives a new theory of how gradual, large scale change in
collective preferences is possible. The core of builds on the notion of a ‘Spiral of Silence (SOS)’

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(Noelle-Neumann 1993). According to SOS theory, as people learn their opinions are unpopular,
they begin to fear that expressing them will lead to social isolation or legal action. However,
when people with one specific position on an issue (liberal or conservative) do this en masse, the
larger public is less likely to be exposed to arguments in favor of that side’s views. Collective
opinion shifts against the preferences of this ‘silenced’ group in SOS theory.

I theorize that when the tone of coverage on an issue later shifts in favor of those that have been
silenced, this process reverses itself. However, on political issues, only those highly active in
politics see the shift in tone. On cultural issues, while the shift in tone may originate in politics, it
quickly cascades into other types of media also---most prominently entertainment and fictional
media. Cultural change is thus broader than mere political change. I show that this was the case
on LGBTQ rights and marijuana legalization. Depictions of LGBTQ people and sympathetic
portrayals of marijuana users were normalized after the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama. These candidates shifted the tone on these issues toward more liberal perspectives. I find
a similar process unfolded in right wing media also. Internet media began to raise alarm bells
about the dangers of restrictions on firearm sales after Obama was elected.

A shift in tone on cultural issues, because it is transmitted both by political and entertainment
media, thus reaches a much larger audience than similar changes in tone on political issues. I
theorize that, while this change in tone transmitted by media has some direct effects on public
opinion, its more profound effect is through the destigmatization of viewpoints of those who had
previously feared expressing their views. This is the real process through which social change
happens. The ‘Spiral of Silence’ runs in reverse, as formerly stigmatized groups share their
preferences with others.

Why is it that younger people are always early adopters of social change? Theoretically, younger
people should be more responsive to this interpersonal influence, as they both fear social
isolation more than older individuals and have less firm preferences on cultural and social issues.
Thus, the reversal of a SOS affects younger people’s attitudes much earlier in the process of
social change than older folks. This explains one of the most prominent and least understood
features of social change, the emergence of age-based gaps in opinions.

Chapter 3: The Cultural is Political:

The Role of Social Movements, Political Change, and ‘Cultural Moments’
What is the origin of social change? What is the ‘spark’ that starts the ‘fire’? This chapter begins
the major arc of the book by answering this question. It also outlines the history of the four major
cases under study here: LGBTQ rights, marijuana legalization, gun control, and immigration.
These cases form nearly the entire universe of issues that have seen large scale change in
collective preferences since 1990.

The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the timelines and major events of change on each of
these issues after a brief discussion of social change on racial and gender equality in the 20th
century. Attitude change on race, gender, and abortion started before the rise of systematic
survey research, leaving us without adequate data to study change on these issues in the same
depth as later changes. By the 1980s, preferences on these issues had reached an equilibrium and
change in collective preferences has largely ceased.

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On LGBTQ rights, mass preference change appears to have been triggered by the rise of the
AIDS crisis. LGBTQ activism increased in the late 1980s with the goal of drawing attention to
government inaction on AIDS. This caused political leaders in the Democratic Party, such as Bill
Clinton, to take note. Clinton’s campaign endorsed LGBTQ rights, largely to appeal to a
politically savvy and active LGBTQ community. AIDS activism in the media and Clinton’s 1992
presidential campaign changed the tone that LGBTQ issues were discussed with to be much
more supportive of homosexuality. Similar processes unfolded on the issue of the legalization of
cannabis twice: first in 1996, when California passed medical marijuana by initiative and again
during the 2008 election of Barack Obama. On gun control, Obama’s election was also important
because it increased concern---and even fear---among gun enthusiasts that firearms sales would
soon be restricted, and legally obtained arms confiscated. Political developments are also shown
to have upset the status quo on the immigration issue with the creation of the Deferred Action for
Early Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program during the Obama Administration.

These political events represent the beginnings of what I term ‘cultural moments’. Politicians,
seeking to please constituents active in politics on these issues have an incentive to adopt the
positions of these constituents, rather than those of most voters, because politically active
constituents contribute to reelection campaigns (Bishin 2010). This support reshuffles the status
quo on these issues, allowing for the possibility of wider scale social changes.

Chapter 4: Televised (and Untelevised) Revolutions.

If the developments outlined in the prior chapter had occurred by themselves, opinion change on
these issues would have evolved in ways identical to political issues: a small shift that rapidly
disappears (Page and Shapiro 1992). In this chapter, I show that shifts in tone on cultural issues
tend to metastasize. They expand quickly to other forms of media. Specifically, media attention
to cultural issues shifts to entertainment television, soft news, and other subcultural media like
various communities on the Internet.

I show this happened on cultural issues using various forms of trend data. For instance,
immediately after the political events on LGBTQ rights described in the last chapter,
representation of LGBTQ people in entertainment programming proliferated. Positive depictions
of marijuana use appeared in various sectors of entertainment programming in 2009 and 2010;
reported use of cannabis began to increase; and these changes were immediately followed by
attempts to legalize cannabis outright by initiative in more supportive states. On gun control,
firearms sales exploded from 2009 to 2012 and the NRA started their own media channel.
Depictions of, and discussions of, the rights of undocumented immigrants also increased during
the Obama Administration as social movement mobilization in favor of comprehensive
immigration reform expanded.

Chapter 5: Just Between Us (and the World):

Entertainment Media, Destigmatization, and Interpersonal Influence
As political events cascade into more significant cultural changes, the universe of individuals
coming into contact with the ‘cultural moment’ multiplies. In this chapter, I show how the

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developments of the prior two chapters resulted in a remarkably similar process of mass opinion
change despite the different time periods and historical sequences of social change across issues.

The major process undergirding opinion change on these issues has been the reversal of a ‘spiral-
of-silence’. Using multiple datasets containing historical polling data on each issue, including
media based polls from the Washington Post, CNN, Pew, Gallup, and the General Social Survey
and its panel studies. I show that close interpersonal contact (friends, family, etc..) with those
who care about these issues---LGBTQ people, marijuana users, gun owners, and undocumented
immigrants---results in attitude change in a consistent fashion regardless of issue. These
individuals tended to conceal their identities and preferences before the cultural moment, but as
political change cascaded into cultural change on each, these individuals all found their positions
destigmatized. Social change in mass opinion followed.

More surprisingly, I show that reported interpersonal connections with these groups has a much
larger effect for younger people in every instance. In doing so, this research is first to determine
what makes younger people ‘more impressionable’ on cultural issues: interpersonal influence
with friends, family, and others that care about those issues, and whose lives are affected by
them the most.

While attitude change on political issues is rapid, but short lived (Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey
1987), it is this process of destigmatization and interpersonal contact that makes opinion change
on cultural issues more durable, gradual, and of a larger magnitude. Those whose lives are
affected by the politics of cultural issues may not encounter such political or entertainment media
signaling that their preferences are no longer as stigmatized until well after the political events
which had initially triggered the ‘cultural moment’ had waned. Thus, change on these issues is
gradual, taking place over the course of years rather than all at once. Furthermore, because young
people---whose preferences shift first---gradually replace older people in the public, inter-cohort
replacement means that shifts in collective preferences can continue decades after the process
has begun.

Lastly, I assess the direct effects of entertainment and subcultural media on opinion change. I
find that the direct effects of such media are pervasive but act more intensely on different
generations by issue. On LGBTQ rights, entertainment media had a large effect on Millennials;
on marijuana, entertainment media had the largest effect on Generation X and the younger Baby
Boomers. On gun control, internet exposure appears to have affected older people’s preferences
most intensely. These effects all contributed to large shifts in collective preferences, but the
evidence in this chapter suggests that all the most distinct features of social change are caused by
the destigmatizing effects of cultural shifts and increased interpersonal exposure to those whose
lives are affected by these issues.

Chapter 6: The Affective Roots of Cultural Preferences

Partisanship is the most important and consistent predictor of attitudes on most issues (Campbell,
Converse, Miller, and Stokes 1960). This is one of the most enduring findings in the history of
political behavior. On cultural issues, however, ideological identification frequently dominates
partisanship as a predictor of attitudes.

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Here, I use the American National Election Studies in 2012 and 2016 to determine why this is
the case. I test several hypotheses regarding what it is about ideological identification that leads
to this effect. First, I explore how the known causes of ideological identification affect support
for cultural issues: personality predispositions and traits like openness to new experiences,
conscientiousness, authoritarianism, and opinionation; support for egalitarian values; affect
toward liberals and conservatives and affect towards social groups associated with the cultural
left and cultural right. I find that the stability of the gut reactions that individuals have toward
lesbians and gay, immigrants, the tea party, fundamentalist Christians, and other social groups
appear to induce opinion stability on cultural issues in contrast to political issues (where
partisanship serves as a corresponding anchor for preferences).

Chapter 7: Resurgent Youth Liberalism and the Future of The American Politics
Does social change in mass opinion matter for politics in the United States? Or is social change
on these issues just a series of ends unto themselves? Here I show that social change does
feedback into political change. Specifically, I show, using the General Social Survey panel study
from 2012 to 2016, that change in preferences on cultural issues directly translates into change in
ideological identification and that this change has been more pronounced among the millennial
generation. According to my calculations, millennials have grown 4% more liberal in
identification, solely because of their shifts in preferences on LGBTQ rights, gun control, and
marijuana. Shockingly, liberalism is rapidly pulling even with conservatism in popularity among
millennials, not because of political polarization, but because of change on cultural attitudes.
This finding is of large importance for the future of American politics as it suggests that cultural
forces and interpersonal exposure to diverse peoples are pushing younger people more liberal,
not political forces or ‘media bubbles’.

Chapter 8: Learning from One Another: Diversity, Change, and the Human Condition
In this final chapter, I digress into a discussion of the discipline of public opinion research. I
discuss how a lack of demographic diversity affected the research interests of field, and why this
lead to a biased understanding of how public opinion evolves and changes in post-industrial
societies. As formerly quiescent groups have awakened in recent years, social change in public
opinion has occurred, and this new opinion diversity in liberal democracies can lead to better
decision-making if people share their preferences more often with elected officials. The rise of
diversity has also occurred in public opinion research, now revealing a more complete
understanding of opinion change. I also outline a set of best practices for those wishing to
encourage change on their own.

Market Considerations

In terms of the academic literature, the chances of this project book having a significant impact on
the American political behavior field are high. The consistency of the results across issues suggests
that they are part of an unrecognized broad class of issues. My theory and findings explain several
inconsistencies in the field. Since this is the first work to show that research on these issues is
generalizable, the book should be of wide interest to public opinion researchers and their students.
Likewise, this book should become the ‘go-to’ book for those interested in the dynamics of social
change in mass opinion in other disciplines. This is the first book to study social change in

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attitudes, as a broad phenomenon and without a single-issue focus, using representative samples
of the population, and with an eye to uncovering general processes rather than just case-specific
explanations.

That said, I am writing this book in such away to make it accessible and entertaining to non-
specialists, particularly those interested in causing social change. It would be a waste of time to
write an academic book that will do little more than sit on the selves of academic offices. The case
studies are written in a way to provide real life examples of how social movements have
successfully affected change and parts of several chapters attempt to make clear what the ‘best
practices’ for such movements should be. Thus, I am confident the book will have significant non-
academic appeal among political activists in addition to being accessible for use in lower division
general education classes were professors want to convey to students interested in changing the
world just how they can go about doing just that with greatest effect.

Length of Manuscript, Pictures, Tables, and Completion Timeline

My estimated length for the manuscript is about 100,000 words. I use figures and tables
liberally. I estimate the number of figures and tables in the completed manuscript to be about 20
and 15 respectively. Many of these figures are designed to more clearly illustrate and emphasize
the results of statistical analyses by supplementing or replacing traditional regression tables to
improve ease of interpretation. Depending on the preferences of the editorial team, several of the
tables can be easily moved to appendixes and a few analyses in the manuscript can be omitted.

While the core analyses of the book are complete, the manuscript needs to written. The estimated
completion date for 5 of the chapters is Feb. 31st, 2019. The estimated time for completion of the
final manuscript is Aug. 31st, 2019.
Author Information

Jeremiah J. Garretson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University

East Bay. His first book, The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed
Public Opinion was released by the NYU Press in early 2018. His recent work is on how social
movements and the mass media change public opinion and has been published in The Journal of
Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Research Quarterly.

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