ISSUE SALIENCE, LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND JUDICIAL IMPACT IN THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

Judicial decisions influence many aspects of society. We investigate their influence in two critical areas: media attention to specific legal issues (issue salience), and media ideas about law and legality (legal consciousness). One of the most important ways judicial decisions might influence society is by drawing attention to specific legal and political issues, or issue salience. Attention to a particular issue or policy is an important determinant of whether public officials act (Boydstun Reference Boydstun2013). Because attention is a scarce resource, a limited number of issues can be considered at any one time. Thus, the prioritization of one issue over others is critical, as this focus increases the probability of change on that issue while decreasing the probability of change on less salient issues (Flemming, Wood, and Bohte Reference Flemming, Dan Wood and Bohte1999).

There is significant debate as to whether courts can influence the salience of issues among elected officials and the mass public. Some scholars argue that important court decisions, at least on some issues, can focus the attention of both elected officials and ordinary citizens on these issues (e.g., Rice Reference Rice2020). However, others argue that the causal arrow points in the opposite direction, with courts responding to the preferences of elected officials and the mass public (e.g., Bryan Reference Bryan2020; Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha Reference Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha2019). Thus, while a plausible case for court influence on issue salience can be made, many questions remain about the precise nature of these effects.

Major judicial decisions may also influence legal consciousness—that is, how ordinary individuals and groups understand and use law (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey2010). Research on legal consciousness demonstrates that individuals and groups develop subjective understandings of the workings of the law; that they arrive at conclusions about the relevance, efficacy, and justness of legal processes; and that these subjective understandings influence whether and how these actors make use of legal venues to address problems they face (e.g., Kirkland Reference Kirkland2008; Marshall Reference Marshall2005). Courts may play an important role in the development of legal consciousness. Through their rulings, courts convey powerful messages about the values the law endorses, the interests the law privileges, and the ways in which (if at all) law will address salient issues in society (McCann Reference McCann1994). Such decisions may inform individuals’ and groups’ beliefs about the relevance, efficacy, and justness of law.

To date, however, most research on legal consciousness has focused on exploring how individuals and groups constitute meaning and develop strategies for action (or acquiescence) in the presence of a given legal regime, rather than on analyzing whether and how the legal consciousness of individuals and groups evolves in response to a major change to the regime stemming from decisions handed down by courts (e.g., Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Hull Reference Hull2016). Thus, more work needs to be done to understand whether and how individuals and groups update their beliefs about law and the legal system in response to important court decisions.

A careful study of the LGBTQ+ community—and, specifically, specialized media serving the LGBTQ+ community—provides an ideal opportunity to investigate whether, when, and how court decisions have the potential to induce change in the issue salience and legal consciousness of individuals and groups. Because members of the LGBTQ+ community frequently face discrimination and exclusion—some officially sanctioned by law—they often consider using the legal system to fight for their rights (Pinello Reference Pinello2003). Law and legal advocacy thus occupy a particularly prominent place in the everyday lives of members of this community (Barclay, Bernstein, and Marshall Reference Barclay, Bernstein and Marshall2009; Knauer Reference Knauer2012). Moreover, since the early 1990s, the LGBTQ+ community has experienced a dramatic expansion in legal rights, due in significant part to LGBTQ+ advocacy-fueled decisions by courts, executives, and legislatures. Yet, despite these developments, there has been little research on how such decisions—and, in particular, how judicial decisions—feed back into media serving the community, potentially influencing the issues that are most salient or the way LGBTQ+ community members understand law and legality (Hull Reference Hull2016).

Of course, there is a large literature on LGBTQ+ legal advocacy (e.g., Andersen Reference Andersen2009; Eskridge and Riano Reference Eskridge and Riano2020; Frank Reference Frank2017), as well as a substantial literature on legal consciousness in the LGBTQ+ community (e.g., Connolly Reference Connolly2002; Gash and Raiskin Reference Gash and Raiskin2018; Harding Reference Harding2006; Hull Reference Hull2003; Reference Hull2006; Reference Hull2016; Richman Reference Richman, Fleury-Steiner and Nielsen2006). Scholars have also investigated how court decisions on gay rights have impacted society at large (e.g., Clark et al. Reference Clark, Staton, Wang and Agichtein2018; Flores and Barclay Reference Flores and Barclay2015; Keck Reference Keck2009; Kreitzer, Hamilton, and Tolbert Reference Kreitzer, Hamilton and Tolbert2014; Stoutenborough, Haider-Markel, and Allen Reference Stoutenborough, Haider-Markel and Allen2006). And, there are several excellent works that examine mainstream media coverage of court decisions affecting the LGBTQ+ community (Gash Reference Gash2015; Klarman Reference Klarman2013; Mucciaroni Reference Mucciaroni2009).

But we have not identified work specifically examining judicial impact on issue salience or legal consciousness in the LGBTQ+ community, as measured in the content of specialized media serving the LGBTQ+ community. Studying the effects of judicial actions on media serving the LGBTQ+ community is crucial for several reasons. First, it promises to advance our understanding of the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and authoritative legal decisions. Examining the portrayal and discussion of these decisions in LGBTQ+ media provides insights on how this marginalized group is influenced by, and responds to, legal rulings and offers a nuanced perspective on the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community with respect to legal and political institutions. Second, the responses of LGBTQ+ media to judicial decisions offers valuable lessons applicable to other marginalized communities. The parallels in experiences between different marginalized groups suggest that the insights gained from our study may extend well beyond the LGBTQ+ community. Thus, in-depth analysis of the influence of judicial decisions on media serving the LGBTQ+ community may also provide new insights into how high-profile legal disputes shape issue salience and the legal consciousness of other marginalized groups, and more generally. In all, our research aims not just to advance our understanding of the LGBTQ+ community’s response to judicial decisions, but also aspires to be a cornerstone for exploring the broader dynamics of media, legal consciousness, and issue salience among marginalized communities.

STUDYING JUDICIAL IMPACT THROUGH LGBTQ+ MEDIA

We believe that studying specialized LGBTQ+ media—that is, media produced by and for members of the LGBTQ+ community—offers a unique and powerful lens for examining issue salience and legal consciousness in the community and investigating whether and how judicial decisions are influential. Media play a central role in shaping individuals’ views of legal matters (e.g., Clawson, Kegler, and Waltenburg Reference Clawson, Kegler and Waltenburg2001). For example, research confirms media powerfully affects the salience of legal issues in society, particularly through its tendency to grant overwhelming attention to a few legal issues at the expense of many others (Boydstun Reference Boydstun2013; Clark, Lax, and Rice Reference Clark, Lax and Rice2015; Davis Reference Davis2011; Epstein and Segal Reference Epstein and Segal2000). Likewise, popular media can transmit powerful messages about what the law is, how it works, and whether and to what extent it represents a useful and effective vehicle of social change (e.g., Hawes and Kong Reference Hawes and Kong2013; Kohm Reference Kohm2006).

Our focus on examining specialized LGBTQ+ media (as opposed to the media at large) is based on the reality that the so-called “mainstream media” have historically downplayed the struggles of LGBTQ+ Americans until relatively recently (Chomsky and Barclay Reference Chomsky and Barclay2010). Further, the mainstream media serve very broad and diverse audiences and are thus not the best source for understanding issue salience and the legal consciousness of marginalized groups. In such media, economic imperatives, journalistic conventions, and explicit and implicit biases combine to obscure, dilute, and/or distort the legal views of marginalized groups (Engel Reference Engel2013; Iyengar et al. Reference Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra and Westwood2019). Extant studies of coverage of LGBTQ+ issues in mainstream newspapers suggest that stories tend to provide relatively equal space to supporters and opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, a pattern that reflects the journalistic norm of “objectivity” but does not serve the end of closely understanding LGBTQ+ issue salience or legal consciousness (Allen and Haider-Markel Reference Allen and Haider-Markel2006; Cabosky and Gibson Reference Cabosky and Gibson2019; Li and Liu Reference Li and Liu2010).

In contrast, LGBTQ+ media offer a unique window into how legal issues arise in, and are understood by members of that community. Existing research on media serving marginalized communities suggests such media are more likely to act as an advocate of the community, providing information of particular interest to the community, and using frames, arguments, and sources that bolster the community’s interests and values (Clawson, Strine, and Waltenburg Reference Clawson, Strine and Waltenburg2003). Media serving the LGBTQ+ community may also help community members stay informed about the legal and cultural struggles and activism involving their members (Sender Reference Sender2001; Streitmatter Reference Streitmatter1993) and thereby form a basis for collective legal and political action (Billard and Gross Reference Billard and Gross2020). For these reasons, we believe that a focus on specialized LGBTQ+ media offers an ideal opportunity for understanding issue salience and legal consciousness in this specific marginalized community.

LAWRENCE, GOODRIDGE, AND LOFTON: THREE DECISIONS WITH THE POTENTIAL TO INFLUENCE LGBTQ+ ISSUE SALIENCE AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS

To examine the potential influence of judicial decisions on issue attention and the legal consciousness of media serving the LGBTQ+ community, we focus on three important judicial decisions—two that significantly expanded LGBTQ+ rights, and one that did not—that were handed down within a short period of time in the early 2000s. On June 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas, overruling its decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and holding that a Texas statute prohibiting same-sex individuals from engaging in private sexual conduct violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Court’s decision had the effect of overturning state laws that were tailored to prohibit same-sex sexual activity.

Less than 5 months later, on November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health that gay and lesbian couples in Massachusetts had a right to civil marriage. The decision concluded that the state’s denial of marriage licenses to seven same-sex couples violated the liberty and equality protections of the Massachusetts Constitution. The decision directly quoted the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Lawrence that “Our obligation [as judges] is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code” (440 Mass 309, at 312).

Roughly 2 months after Goodridge was announced, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued its decision in Lofton v. Secretary of the Department of Children & Family Services. Here, the court upheld Florida’s state ban on “adoption by practicing homosexuals” (358 F.3d 794, at 806), holding that adoption was a statutory privilege rather than a fundamental constitutional right. The court ruled that the state’s strong interest in child welfare superseded adult interests in liberty, procedural fairness, and equality of treatment, at least in the context of adoption access.

While each decision was important, each differed along two important dimensions. First, by virtue of the respective jurisdictions of the involved courts, Lawrence applied throughout the nation, Goodridge applied more narrowly to Massachusetts, and Lofton applied to the region of the Eleventh Circuit (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia). Second, the scale of the legal consequences differed markedly. Though a decision with nation-wide application and considerable symbolic significance, Lawrence had little immediate legal impact, because few states at the time of the decision retained statutes criminalizing same-sex private sexual conduct, and even fewer enforced statutes still on the books. In contrast, even though Goodridge applied only to residents of Massachusetts, it marked the first time a U.S. court of last resort had identified a constitutional right to marry for same-sex partners that would go into effect, and was viewed by both supporters and opponents as a groundbreaking ruling likely portending future pro-LGBTQ+ decisions at the state and federal levels. Finally, Lofton upheld existing limitations on LGBTQ+ rights, and seemingly tapped the brakes on the legal advances announced in Lawrence and Goodridge.

Thus, while each of the cases is a plausible candidate for judicial influence on issue attention and legal consciousness in the LGBTQ+ community, their important differences make them particularly useful for comparing the respective impact of different types of court decisions on these outcomes. Each of these cases dealt with issues of central concern to the LGBTQ+ community, issues that received coverage well before the Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton decisions. Our goal is to understand whether and how these important decisions change the attention and tone of LGBTQ+ media in articles discussing law and courts.

LAWRENCE, GOODRIDGE, LOFTON, AND ISSUE SALIENCE: HYPOTHESES

Lawrence v. Texas announced the freedom to engage in same-sex intimate relations without interference from the government. Because overturning so-called “anti-sodomy” laws had long been an important priority for the LGBTQ+ community, investigating the potential influence of the Lawrence decision provides a useful window into how judicial decisions may or may not affect issue salience in media serving that community. There are two pathways by which Lawrence might be influential. The first is a policy-specific pathway, in which the ruling serves as a “focusing event” (Baumgartner and Jones Reference Baumgartner and Jones2013; Birkland Reference Adams1997) that drives increased attention to the issue of sodomy. The second possible pathway is a policy spillover (e.g., Brown Reference Brown2013) pathway, in which the decision, through its explicit and implicit implications for adjacent areas of law, leads to increased attention to contiguous issues relating to sexuality, relationships, and family formation.

In the case of a policy-specific pathway, we might expect increased attention to sodomy as a policy issue in LGBTQ+ media following the decision, given the historical importance of these laws as a tool for discrimination. Alternatively, given the relative decline in the importance of anti-sodomy laws as a policy issue even before Lawrence, we might expect that the real impact of the ruling is via policy spillover, as the decision in Lawrence established protections under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment for members of the LGBTQ+ community that might be applicable in contiguous areas relating to sexuality, relationships, and families. If policy spillover effects are present, we would expect to see increased attention to other areas of law, such as marriage, adoption, or other family rights, where the decision was prospectively relevant. In either case, increased attention to a topic after the decision would indicate that the Lawrence decision shaped the agenda of LGBTQ+ media. If Lawrence was not influential, we would expect to see no change in attention to topics after the decision.

Marriage equality, the issue in the Goodridge case, arose as a politically salient issue in the LGBTQ+ community beginning in the 1970s, though early marriage equality suits brought by gay and lesbian couples were unsuccessful (Koppelman Reference Koppelman2006; Pinello Reference Pinello2003). The fight for same-sex marriage grew substantially in visibility in the 1990s in part because of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s determination in Baehr v. Lewin (1993) that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause. Subsequently, there was massive backlash throughout the country in the 1990s and 2000s as numerous states passed constitutional amendments or legislation prohibiting same-sex marriage, and the federal government passed the Defense of Marriage Act (Keck Reference Keck2009). This kept marriage equality a salient issue in national and state politics through the present (Moscowitz Reference Moscowitz2013).

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s 2003 decision in Goodridge thus provides a robust test of the impact of the decision on issue salience for two reasons. First, Goodridge was decided by a state court, not the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was thus narrow in scope, applying only to the state of Massachusetts. Second, same-sex marriage was already highly salient throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. It is therefore plausible that Goodridge caused no increase in attention to an already salient issue. Nonetheless, we suspect that Goodridge will have policy-specific effects, leading to an increase in discussions of same-sex marriage in LGBTQ+ media.

Finally, the salience of parental and custodial rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community also increased from the 1970s onward (Brodzinsky and Pertman Reference Brodzinsky and Pertman2012). Though early legal battles generally “involved individual lesbian and gay parents struggling to maintain custody of their children from prior heterosexual marriages” (Gash and Raiskin Reference Gash and Raiskin2018, 88), from the late 1980s onward much of the litigation focused on the ability of members of the LGBTQ+ community to adopt or foster children.

Changes in adoptive rights offer a marked contrast to changes in the area of marriage equality. By 2006, same-sex couples had the opportunity for second-parent adoptions, with parental rights extended to a partner in more than half of the states of the nation (Gash and Raiskin Reference Gash and Raiskin2018). Thus, while marriage equality was a decade away and many states retained outright bans on same-sex marriage, avenues for same-sex couples to share custody of adopted children existed. Indeed, Florida, the state at the center of the conflict in Lofton, was one of the last states to rescind their state ban on adoption by members of the LGBTQ+ community. Because Lofton upheld an existing limitation on LGBTQ+ rights, we expect no change in attention to custodial policy through the policy-specific pathway. Through the policy spillover pathway, however, we expect spillover effects in other areas of law, as the setback encourages alternative pathways to achieving custodial rights.

LAWRENCE, GOODRIDGE, LOFTON, AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS: HYPOTHESES

We also investigate the effect of Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton on the tone of the LGBTQ+ media’s coverage of courts, which may have an important influence on LGBTQ+ legal consciousness. Research demonstrates that media can play a significant role in shaping how individuals understand, and feel about, law and legal institutions (e.g., Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey2010). One way this occurs is through the tone used by the media in its coverage of legal concepts (Burns and Crawford Reference Burns and Crawford1999; Haltom and McCann Reference Haltom and McCann2004). When media cover legal institutions, and their decisions, in a favorable light, this can increase positive attitudes toward legal actors among audiences. Conversely, when legal institutions and decisions are framed in a negative manner, this can activate negative sentiment toward legal actors (e.g., Baird and Gangl Reference Baird and Gangl2006) and mobilize affected communities (Clawson, Strine, and Waltenburg Reference Clawson, Strine and Waltenburg2003, 795). Indeed, media framing of legal issues can be so strong that it has been attributed as the source of widespread misunderstandings of the American litigation “crisis” (Haltom and McCann Reference Haltom and McCann2004) and moral panic related to school shootings (Burns and Crawford Reference Burns and Crawford1999).

Following this work, we examine changes in the tone of articles involving judicial decisions. Importantly, we capture article tone over time, revealing temporal changes that may be attributable to judicial decisions. Our argument is that, when reporters and editors from the LGBTQ+ community cover judicial decisions in a positive light, this demonstrates positive affect toward courts, and may serve to activate positive feelings toward courts among readers. Conversely, stories that portray judicial decisions negatively reflect negative affect toward courts and may stimulate negative feelings among readers toward legal institutions (e.g., Allen and Haider-Markel Reference Allen and Haider-Markel2006; Berinsky and Kinder Reference Berinsky and Kinder2006). Thus, we are capturing one aspect of the legal consciousness of elite actors—reporters and editors—in the LGBTQ+ community that has the potential to percolate to readers and thereby shape affect toward courts in the LGBTQ+ community more broadly.

We posit that both Lawrence and Goodridge will increase positive affect in articles in LGBTQ+ media mentioning courts, while Lofton will produce a negative shift. Both Lawrence and Goodridge were significant legal victories for the LGBTQ+ community, interrupting a string of legal and political defeats from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s (Frank Reference Frank2017). As a result, we hypothesize discussions of courts will have a more positive tone after these decisions. In contrast, the decision in Lofton upheld existing limitations, and sought to circumscribe the reach of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence. We therefore hypothesize the circuit’s decision will produce more negative tone in articles discussing courts.

DATA AND IDENTIFICATION

To test our expectations, we assembled an original corpus of articles published in LGBTQ+ media using the ProQuest LGBT Magazine Archive, a searchable digital archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBTQ+ interests. The Archive maintains digital files of articles from 26 leading LGBTQ+ periodicals from the United States, the UK, and a few other nations dating from the 1950s through to recent years.Footnote ¹ Very importantly, the Archive maintains the full text for the entire run of The Advocate, the leading (and longest continually-running) magazine serving the LGBTQ+ community in the United States (Streitmatter Reference Streitmatter1993).

Limiting our investigation to U.S.-based periodicals, we searched for the keyword “court” to identify articles that include discussions of judicial decisions. Because the periodicals under analysis cover a wider range of topics (including lifestyle, culture, health, and religion), we used this keyword to narrow our dataset to articles related to judicial decisions. Our search strategy follows that employed in a large body of work examining coverage of judicial decisions that reduce a large corpus of text using the term “court” or more specific analogs such as “Supreme Court” (e.g., Clark, Lax, and Rice Reference Clark, Lax and Rice2015; Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha Reference Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha2019; Epstein and Segal Reference Epstein and Segal2000). Importantly, the use of the keyword “court” means that we capture a broad swath of articles relating to judicial rulings, not just those specific to the Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton decisions. This is appropriate because our objective is to assess whether and how these decisions affect LGBTQ+ media coverage toward the courts in general (not just toward Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton).

We acquired a roughly symmetrical window of articles appearing around the Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton decisions; the earliest appeared in the March 3, 1998 issue of The Advocate, and the latest appeared in the July 20, 2009 issue of Erie Gay News. In all, we identified 1,229 articles appearing in, among others, Erie Gay News (165 articles), Just for Us (17 articles), The Advocate (954 articles), and Transgender Tapestry (74 articles). The three sources from which the overwhelming majority of articles are drawn vary significantly in their substantive foci: Erie Gay News is a monthly publication focusing on current events with an emphasis on the gay community of Erie, Pennsylvania; Transgender Tapestry focuses on topics relating to the transgender community; and The Advocate offers broad spectrum coverage of news and events relating to LGBTQ+ people worldwide.Footnote ² In Figure 1, we plot the distribution of articles over time. It is clear from the plot that coverage varied significantly, with a low of 45 articles in 1999 to a high of 177 articles in 2004, during and after the decisions of interest.

Figure 1. Counts of Articles by Year

EMPIRICAL RESULTS

Issue Salience

To investigate issue salience, we employ structural topic models (STM), a class of mixed-membership topic models designed to incorporate known information about the texts and an approach well designed for testing the influence of specific events, like judicial decisions, on topical attention (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Stewart, Tingley and Airoldi2013). The STM enables estimation of relationships between non-text variables associated with documents and the prevalence of topics (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Nielsen, Roberts, Stewart, Storer and Tingley2015, 255). In recent years, STMs have been used to study an array of phenomena, including the ideological content of Arabic fatwas (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Nielsen, Roberts, Stewart, Storer and Tingley2015), elite beliefs about climate change (Mildenberger and Tingley Reference Mildenberger and Tingley2019), and the subject matter of judicial opinions (Rice Reference Rice2019). Here, STM permits us to examine our core question about the salience of legal issues in the LGBTQ+ community: (how) does topic prevalence change over time as a result of key court decisions?

We prepared the text for analysis by removing capitalization and punctuation while retaining only words appearing more than 20 times across the corpus and minimally in 5% of all articles. To select the appropriate number of topics, we rely on a variety of criteria, which are presented in the Supplementary material, and settle on a model with 12 topics. While we select the number of topics, the STM inductively identifies the content of topics based on word co-occurrence patterns in the document texts (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Stewart, Tingley and Airoldi2013).

In our STM, as predictors of topical prevalence (i.e., the amount that a topic is discussed within a document), we included three primary covariates: an indicator variable for articles occurring after the Lawrence decision, an indicator for articles appearing after the Goodridge decision, and an indicator for articles appearing after the Lofton decision. This setup allows us to assess whether particular topics are more (or less) prevalent in our collection of articles after announcement of the Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton decisions compared to before the announcement of each of the rulings. We also include in the STM a series of indicators for the source (where The Advocate is the excluded category) to account for differences across publications, as well as a temporal spline to address trends. We include the full model results in the Supplementary material, and focus here on two primary topics of interest based on our theoretical expectations.

The first relates to Same-Sex Marriage, with the top four terms for the topic—as determined by a score based on the frequency of the term within the topic and its exclusivity to that topic—being “marriage,” “marry,” “Massachusetts,” and “marriages.” The article most associated with this topic appeared in The Advocate in May of 2004, and discussed the legal limbo that many same-sex couples found themselves in across the nation in the months after the Goodridge decision. The second topic relates more broadly to Domestic Relations, with the top four terms identified as “sodomy,” “Lawrence,” “custody,” and “adoption.” The article most associated with this topic appeared in The Advocate in March of 2003, and discussed the potential of the then-pending Lawrence case to either expand LGBTQ+ rights or to impose new legal limitations, including in areas like adoption by same-sex couples.

We are particularly interested in understanding how the frequency of discussion of the Same-Sex Marriage topic and Domestic Relations topic, respectively, changed after each of the three major decisions in our study. In Figure 2, we plot the effect of each decision on the attention paid to the Same-Sex Marriage topic (left panel) and the Domestic Relations topic (right panel). The points in the plot indicate coefficient estimates, and the bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Points farther to the right of the vertical grey line indicate the topic was discussed more after the indicated court decision, while points to the left indicate the topic was discussed less.

Figure 2. Expected Change in Topic Proportions

Note: Full model results are available in Figure A3 and Table A1 of the Supplementary material.

Beginning with the left panel and Same-Sex Marriage, the plot indicates articles appearing after the decision in Lawrence were, on average, about 10% more focused (x-axis) on Same-Sex Marriage, and the effect is statistically significant at the 95% level. This is consistent with the policy spillover pathway of influence we described above, in which Lawrence sparked increased attention to adjacent LGBTQ+ legal issues, like marriage, that could be affected by Lawrence’s reasoning. Consistent with the policy-specific pathway of influence, the decision in Goodridge led to a substantial (approximately 8%) increase in average coverage of Same-Sex Marriage in articles discussing courts (p = 0.06). Finally, in another example of policy spillover, the decision in Lofton was also associated with a statistically significant increase of approximately 10% in the average amount of attention devoted by articles to Same-Sex Marriage. Taken together, the STM indicates that LGBTQ+ media were talking substantially more about Same-Sex Marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton. Such a pattern strongly suggests an important impact of these decisions on the salience of the issue of Same-Sex Marriage in the LGBTQ+ community: the media serving the community focused much more on the issue of marriage equality after important victories at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Massachusetts but also after a subsequent setback in a related area in a lower federal court of appeals.

These dynamics stand in stark contrast to what we find with respect to Domestic Relations. There, we see no change in coverage associated with the decision in Lawrence, indicating the decision in Lawrence was important not primarily through policy impact, but rather because of its spillover implications for adjacent areas of law. Therefore, the shift in attention toward Same-Sex Marriage provides initial evidence that Lawrence led media serving the LGBTQ+ community to think about leveraging the decision to achieve legal gains in other areas.

Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that both subsequent cases are associated with declines in attention to Domestic Relations. Goodridge is associated with a reduction of about 8% (p = 0.06) in the discussion of the Domestic Relations topic, while Lofton is associated with a statistically significant reduction of about the same amount. The latter pattern is especially important, as it indicates that after an unsuccessful legal challenge leveraging Lawrence on one policy dimension (adoptive rights), greater attention was paid to another policy dimension (same-sex marriage) where the successful legal challenge in Goodridge had leveraged the decision in Lawrence. This represents an interesting, and significant, shift for the LGBTQ+ movement: while marriage equality held out the prospect of adoption and custodial rights for married LGBTQ+ couples, it did not necessarily ensure similar rights for single LGBTQ+ people or un-married LGBTQ+ couples.

Article Tone and Legal Consciousness

While we have shown that Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton changed the relative salience of same-sex marriage and domestic relations in articles in LGBTQ+ media, our argument asserts these decisions may also influence the overall tone (an indicator of legal consciousness) of these articles. To investigate, we turn to sentiment analysis and analyze the sentiment of articles appearing before and after each of the decisions. Sentiment analysis has been widely deployed in the social sciences, and has been used both in analyses of judicial decisions (Rice and Zorn Reference Rice and Zorn2019) and media outlets (Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha Reference Collins and Eshbaugh-Soha2019; Young and Soroka Reference Young and Soroka2012).

In the case of Lawrence, where the Court reached a landmark decision that was positive from the perspective of the LGBTQ+ rights claimants, we anticipate an increase in the relative positivity of the language employed in news articles referencing courts following the decisions, suggesting an increase in LGBTQ+ media’s warmth toward the courts. We also expect shifts in tone in LGBTQ+ media in reaction to Goodridge and Lofton. To be sure, it is not wholly implausible that decisions by these inferior courts could produce no change in tone. Both decisions were limited in scope: in Goodridge, to the state of Massachusetts; and in Lofton, to the states covered by the Eleventh Circuit. Additionally, both were, in principle, reversible—in the case of Goodridge, by the actions of state legislators and/or the Massachusetts public, and in the case of Lofton, by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Given these considerations, the reaction of LGBTQ+ media to these decisions might be muted. However, we think that it is equally, if not more, likely that these decisions did influence the tone of LGBTQ+ media. First, we showed that these inferior court decisions produced changes in issue salience, so it is plausible they also produced changes in article tone. Furthermore, LGBTQ+ leaders and activists were very attuned to court decisions—not only for their substantive impact, but also for their symbolic role in either affirming or denying the rights and humanity of LGBTQ+ people. Additionally, LGBTQ+ activists believed that court decisions could spur (either positive or negative) action by elected officials (Andersen Reference Andersen2009; Eskridge and Riano Reference Eskridge and Riano2020; Frank Reference Frank2017). In short, LGBTQ+ activists believed there could be broader spillover consequences of decisions by inferior courts. Of course, LGBTQ+ media might overestimate the significance of decisions of inferior courts. But we still think it is more likely than not that, in the moment, the tone of LGBTQ+ media would be reactive to decisions by inferior courts.

For Goodridge, we expect a positive shift in tone, as the favorable state supreme court decision likely promoted greater positivity toward the legal system. In contrast, for Lofton we expect less positive language to be used after the decision, reflecting the fact that the court of appeals decision represented a significant legal setback.

To construct our measure of article tone, we employ three well-known sentiment dictionaries as well as an ensemble measure based on the average of the scores of those three dictionaries. The three dictionaries are the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (Young and Soroka Reference Young and Soroka2012), the General Inquirer (Stone, Dunphy, and Smith Reference Stone, Dunphy and Smith1966), and the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon (Mohammad and Turney Reference Mohammad and Turney2013). Each dictionary contains extensive lists of positive and negative words, with each individual dictionary exceeding 1,000 words. From each dictionary, we calculate article polarity as the number of positive words minus the number of negative words, divided by the total number of positive and negative words in the article. The resulting measure ranges from −1 to 1, with lower values indicating more negative language and higher values indicating more positive language. Doing so for each dictionary yields three measures of polarity, and we present the results for each measure as well as for an ensemble measure.

For each measure of article polarity, we estimate a linear regression model including separate indicators for each of the Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton decisions, indicating whether (1) or not (0) the article appeared after the respective decision. As controls, we include the same measures as were included in the STM (source indicators and a spline for time), as well as a variable capturing the total number of pages in the article. The latter is included as the English language tends to feature more positive words than negative words (Kloumann et al. Reference Kloumann, Danforth, Harris, Bliss and Dodds2012), so longer articles are likely to be slightly more positive in tone.

The full results are available in the Supplementary material.Footnote ³ We focus here on the results for the three decisions: Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton. In Figure 3, we plot the coefficient estimate and associated 95% confidence interval for each of the variables (delimited by panels) for each of the models of a different sentiment measure (indicated by the y-axis within each plot). Starting first with the top panel and the results for Lawrence, we find evidence of a positive and statistically significant increase of between 8% and 16% (depending on the measure) in the average positivity of LGBTQ+ media articles discussing courts following the decision. This pattern holds for three of the four measures we use to assess tone. The positive increase in polarity is consistent with our expectation of how attention to the courts should theoretically shift within LGBTQ+ media and suggests the critical importance of Lawrence in increasing warmth toward courts in the LGBTQ+ community. Given that these changes in positivity occur in the context of substantial overall increases in the volume of coverage of courts (Figure 1), the observed patterns reflect a critical shift, revealing a change in how LGBTQ+ media understood and talked about the law.

Figure 3. Coefficient Estimates from Model’s Opinion Polarity

Note: Full model results are available in Table A2 of the Supplementary material.

The results for Lawrence offer an interesting counterpoint to what we observe with respect to the other two decisions. After controlling for the increase associated with Lawrence, neither Goodridge nor Lofton was associated with a statistically significant shift in article tone. This observation stands, moreover, across each of the different approaches to measuring article tone. Neither the legal breakthrough of Goodridge nor the legal setback of Lofton led to a statistically significant shift in the positivity of language being used in LGBTQ+ media articles where courts were discussed.

Taken together, the results paint a striking picture. The decision in Lawrence increased the positivity of LGBTQ+ media toward courts and was associated with significantly increased attention to another area, same-sex marriage, where the breakthrough might be relevant. In subsequent months, major court decisions at other levels—Goodridge in Massachusetts and Lofton in the Eleventh Circuit—marked major moments in the movement for LGBTQ+ equality and major changes in attention to same-sex marriage, the area where a breakthrough seemed more likely. However, neither the positive outcome of Goodridge nor the negative outcome of Lofton managed to shift in the same way the positivity of the LGBTQ+ community toward courts. In short, our findings strongly support the conclusion that Lawrence played a central role, but also that important judicial decisions at both the federal and state level advancing LGBTQ+ rights had important and complex effects on issue salience in LGBTQ+ media.

HOW LGBTQ+ MEDIA HELPED PEOPLE UNDERSTAND LEGAL ISSUES: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

We now employ qualitative methods to further examine how LGBTQ+ media report on legal issues affecting the community, and thus potentially influence how ordinary LGBTQ+ people understand these issues and their relationship to the legal system. We undertook a qualitative content analysis (e.g., Schreier Reference Schreier2012), assisted by NVivo software, of the 15 articles from The Advocate in our dataset most associated with the Same-Sex Marriage topic in our STM.Footnote ⁴ These articles are most likely to contain substantial substantive content relating to same-sex marriage. We chose this focus since it closely follows how individuals consume the news by scanning articles for relevant content, and reading those focused on topics of interest (e.g., Dor Reference Dor2003): individuals interested in same-sex marriage are likely to read articles most closely associated with the topic.Footnote ⁵ To support research transparency in our qualitative content analysis, we include annotations for transparent inquiry (ATIs) (e.g., Kapiszewski and Karcher Reference Kapiszewski and Karcher2021) in the Supplementary material, along with full methodological discussion.Footnote ⁶