First, I checked out the polling data on interracial marriage. Every 10 years the approval rating has gone up by ~15 percentage points. I couldn’t find a concise presentation of the age-segregated data from now vs. in the past, but 2007 and 1991 were available, and they look consistent with over 80% of the opinion change being due to old people dying off. This surprised me, I expected to see more evidence of people changing their mind.
Now look at gay marriage.. It’s gained at ~18 points per 10 years. This isn’t too different from 15, so maybe this is people dying off too. And indeed it seems to be mostly the case—except the in the last 10 years, where the gains don’t follow the right age pattern, indicating that of 18 points of gain, about 40% may actually involve people changing their minds.
First, I checked out the polling data on interracial marriage. Every 10 years the approval rating has gone up by ~15 percentage points. I couldn’t find a concise presentation of the age-segregated data from now vs. in the past, but 2007 and 1991 were available, and they look consistent with over 80% of the opinion change being due to old people dying off. This surprised me, I expected to see more evidence of people changing their mind.
Now look at gay marriage.. It’s gained at ~18 points per 10 years. This isn’t too different from 15, so maybe this is people dying off too. And indeed it seems to be mostly the case—except the in the last 10 years, where the gains don’t follow the right age pattern, indicating that of 18 points of gain, about 40% may actually involve people changing their minds.