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This research brief uses data from multiple national surveys and well-established statistical methods to estimate public opinion about marriages for same-sex couples for each state in the United States. Using this technique, we provide updated state level opinion estimates for 2014, highlight how popular opinion varies from state to state, and demonstrate how opinions have changed from 2004 to 2014. We finally turn to projecting statewide support estimates for 2016.

By the end of 2012, 12 states and the District of Columbia had support for same-sex marriage at or above 50%. Of these 12 states, all currently perform marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. Thirteen additional states presently are within 5 percentage points of majority support. In the last eight years, every state has increased in its support for marriage for same-sex couples with an average increase of 13.6%. If present public opinion trends continue, another 8 states will be above 50% support by the end of 2014.

This article reviews the results of a discipline-wide survey concerning lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered in the discipline. We find that both research and teaching on LGBT topics have made some headway into the discipline, and that political scientists largely accept that LGBT issues can be fundamentally political and are worth studying and teaching for that reason. Nonetheless, troubling questions about discrimination both against those who conduct research concerning LBGT issues and LGBT individuals themselves remain.

Using a regression model of pooled time series data from the 50 states in the United States in the period 1990 to 2001, we look at the political demographic, and social movement factors that provide the impetus for the enactment of state laws that proscribe the celebration of marriages involving lesbian and gay couples. In doing so, we consider the validity of existing indicators that have been previously associated with the introduction of policies concerning sexual orientation at the state and local level as well as introduce new factors that might apply uniquely to the area of same-sex marriage laws., Since July 1, 2000, when the law allowing civil unions went into effect in Vermont, until January 4, 2002, 3,471 civil unions involving parties from 48 U.S. states and several [...]

Public policy scholars and public law scholars often study the same substantive issues and have similar theoretical interests. Yet students of the public policy process rarely consider the courts as policymakers in the same manner as do their public law counterparts. We seek to explain this difference in approaches between the two subfields on the question of the courts as policymakers, and we ask how models of the public policy process should incorporate the judiciary., Public policy scholars and public law scholars consider the same policy areas. They ask the same questions and they share a common discipline. Yet these two fields have adopted differing [...]