The Civil Unions vs. Gay Marriage Proposals
by David W. Moore, Senior Gallup Poll Editor
In a Gallup survey, conducted March 5-7, we found a surge in public support for gay civil unions, which would give gay and lesbian couples "some of the legal rights of married couples." Last July, Americans opposed gay civil unions by 57% to 40%, but the March poll showed that Americans favored the idea by 54% to 42% -- an increase in support of 14 percentage points. However, in the new survey, unlike the one last July, respondents were first asked if they favored or opposed marriage for gay couples, and then respondents were asked if they favored or opposed civil unions for gay couples. Given the sharp increase in support for gay civil unions, we wondered: Could the change in question format have contributed to that increase?
Our theory was that in general, many people support gay civil unions as an alternative to gay marriages. If people are asked first about gay civil unions, many might indicate their opposition even though they really oppose gay marriage more generally, and just don't want the interviewer to think that their support for gay civil unions means support for gay marriage. But if respondents are asked first about gay marriage, and are able to indicate their opposition to that idea, then they might be more likely to say they support civil unions -- implicitly as an alternative to gay marriage.
As it turns out, the Pew Research Center had already tested this notion in a poll conducted last fall, Oct. 15-19, and it confirmed our suspicions.
Half of the respondents in the Pew poll were asked about gay marriage first, followed by a question about civil unions. The other half of respondents were asked the question about civil unions and then about gay marriage.
When the civil unions question was asked first, only 37% of respondents said they favored the idea, while 55% were opposed. But among respondents who had already been able to say they opposed gay marriage and were then asked about civil unions, support for civil unions was eight points higher (45%) and opposition (47%) eight points lower.
Views on Civil Unions Depend on the Context Pew Poll, Oct. 15-19, 2003
Asked before gay marriage Asked after gay marriage
Civil unions for gays?
Favor 37 45 Oppose 55 47 Don't know 8 8 TOTAL 100 100
Responses to the gay marriage question, according to the Pew report, were not affected by question order. Opposition remained at nearly 2-to-1, regardless of whether the gay marriage question was asked before or after the civil unions question.
The Pew experiment showed that the effect of asking the gay marriage question first, followed by the civil unions question, was to increase the measure of public support for civil unions by eight percentage points. Because the Pew questions and the Gallup questions are not identical, we cannot assume that Gallup would find the exact same effect. Nevertheless, the Pew findings suggest that somewhere about half of the 14-point increase found by Gallup in its current poll may be due simply to question context -- adding the gay marriage question before the civil unions question. The other half of the increase is most likely due to a real change in public opinion.
The Gallup and Pew polls raise another question: Which measure of public opinion is the "real" one? The answer to this question may be unsatisfactory to most poll watchers: There is no one "real" measure. Both measures provide insights into what the public is thinking. In Massachusetts, where the state legislature is trying to deal with a state supreme court ruling mandating the state to allow gay marriages, support for gay civil unions among state legislators is quite high -- as an alternative to allowing gay marriages. In that trade-off context, the latest Gallup results suggests that a majority of Americans support gay civil unions.