Abstract
Understanding how people form opinions and make decisions is a complex phenomenon that depends on both personal practices and interactions. Recent availability of real-world data has enabled quantitative analysis of opinion formation, which illuminates phenomena that impact physical and social sciences. Public policies exemplify complex opinion formation spanning individual and population scales, and a timely example is the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. Here, we seek to understand how this issue captures the relationship between state-laws and Senate representatives subject to geographical and ideological factors. Using distance-based correlations, we study how physical proximity and state-government ideology may be used to extract patterns in state-law adoption and senatorial support of same-sex marriage. Results demonstrate that proximal states have similar opinion dynamics in both state-laws and senators’ opinions, and states with similar state-government ideology have analogous senators’ opinions. Moreover, senators’ opinions drive state-laws with a time lag. Thus, change in opinion not only results from negotiations among individuals, but also reflects inherent spatial and political similarities and temporal delays. We build a social impact model of state-law adoption in light of these results, which predicts the evolution of state-laws legalizing same-sex marriage over the last three decades.
Highlights
No issue in the United States has demonstrated the complex interaction between political and social life like same-sex marriage. 26 June 2015 was a historic day when the United States became one of 22 countries to legalize same-sex marriage across the 50 states
Among these 37 states, same-sex marriage was legalized in 26 states by court 2 decisions, in eight states by state legislature and in three states by popular vote
The first polling vote among the senators was on 10 September 1996, where the topic was to introduce Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman and to prohibit same-sex marriage
Summary
No issue in the United States has demonstrated the complex interaction between political and social life like same-sex marriage. 26 June 2015 was a historic day when the United States became one of 22 countries to legalize same-sex marriage across the 50 states. The decision was made by the Supreme Court, and prior to that, there were 37 states to legalize same-sex marriage. Among these 37 states, same-sex marriage was legalized in 26 states by court 2 decisions, in eight states by state legislature and in three states by popular vote. The opinion of the senators on this issue has evolved, and in 2014 there were 57 senators who were in support of same-sex marriage. Popular vote and the courts have made remarkable changes over the past two decades in laws defining whether marriage is limited to relationships between a man and a woman or may be extended to same-sex couples
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