DISSERTATION

The Globalization of the Acceptance of Homosexuality: Mass Opinion and National Policy

My dissertation seeks to answer how globalization has affected the status of homosexuality within global popular opinion and law.  I begin the dissertation by conducting a longitudinal multilevel analysis of global change in attitudes toward homosexuality from 1981 to 2012.  This award-winning analysis demonstrates that there has been a broad worldwide upswing in the acceptance of homosexuality, driven by the influence of an elite-level global culture that is increasingly supportive of gay rights.  The results provide arguably the strongest evidence yet that global cultural trends have shaped mass opinion globally.  At the same time, however, the results also point to the particularly strong influence in some world regions of anti-gay institutions and discourses, which have contributed to a widening over time in the attitudinal gap between countries.  I follow that chapter by examining global variation in the organizing power of individualism.  This chapter goes beyond modelling attitudes toward homosexuality, to model the inter-relationship between attitudes toward homosexuality and attitudes toward related subjects.  Finally, I use event history analysis to examine the impact of the domestic-level uptake of, and participation in, pro-gay global cultural norms on the adoption of national gay-rights policies, including policies for the decriminalization of homosexuality.  In contrast to prior work, which has emphasized the role of top-down influences on global diffusion processes, this analysis shows how the global diffusion of gay-rights polices has also been driven by forces that exert their effect from the bottom up.

This dissertation contributes to our knowledge of the recent evolution of global opinion and national policy surrounding homosexuality and gay rights.  The dissertation also makes a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between individual people living around the world and contemporary global culture, which is theorized to reside at an elite, international level.