Same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, the result of a US Supreme Court decision—Obergefell v. Hodges—that came amid an upswing of pro-gay rights opinion in the country so strong that, at one point, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an audience that there was “no urgency” for the Court to decide the issue (Mario Trujillo, “Ginsburg: ‘No Urgency’ yet Gay Marriage,” The Hill, September 17, 2014). These parallel and complementary trends—increased public support for gay rights happening during a period in which gay rights expanded in the United States—challenge an entrenched conventional wisdom among students of law and politics: many scholars have expected enhanced rights protections for minority groups to be accompanied by public opinion backlash.

Perhaps surprisingly, as Benjamin G. Bishin and coauthors convincingly show, the evidence on this front is both conceptually muddled and empirically scattershot. Scholars have conceptualized backlash in different ways; the many different tests of backlash seek to evaluate slightly different theories in differing ways using differing criteria. As a result, the conventional wisdom that backlash occurs is much more abundant than the empirical evidence that it exists.

This is the challenge the coauthors take up in Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights. They have two major tasks in their book. First, they carefully review the received wisdom on public opinion backlash, offering a clear conceptualization of the phenomenon (which they term “mass opinion backlash theory”) and use experimental and observational evidence to demonstrate that the threat of mass public opinion backlash to gay rights advances has been overblown. Second, the authors propose and test an alternative theory to explain the policy consequences of anti-gay animus in the United States: elite-led mobilization theory. The authors argue that anti-gay rights campaigns are led by well-organized elites, typically white evangelical Christians, who capitalize on the issue in pursuit of their political and ideological goals. As the authors describe it, their “central argument is that elite-led mobilization rather than mass opinion backlash best explains the politics of opposition to gay rights” (p. 15).

The book unfolds in three parts. In chapters 1 and 2, the authors introduce their two competing theories. They ground their understanding of mass opinion backlash in theories of attitude formation and change, discussing how our conventional understanding of the nature of public opinion—as typically being quite resistant to change—stands in contrast to the received wisdom about mass opinion backlash. After reviewing conflicting definitions of backlash, they offer a clear conceptualization of the phenomenon: “a large, negative, organic, and enduring shift in opinion against a policy or group that occurs in response to some event that threatens the status quo” (p. 24; emphasis omitted). The authors investigate three implications of mass opinion backlash theory: (1) attempts to advance gay rights should be accompanied by sizable and enduring negative shifts in public opinion, (2) this opinion change should be manifest across the entire population, and (3) this decline in public support should precede elite action regarding gay rights. By contrast, elite-led mobilization suggests three contrasting empirical implications: (1) opposition to gay rights is led by organized elites, (2) elites focus their mobilization efforts on like-minded citizens, and (3) elites mobilize against gay rights both in reaction to advances in gay rights but also prospectively, before gay rights groups act.

In chapters 3–5, the authors report a series of empirical analyses to investigate the presence and prevalence of mass opinion backlash. Chapter 3 focuses on experimental evidence, drawing on surveys of Mechanical Turk workers responding to treatments about the legalization of same-sex marriage in Oregon. The authors find no systematic evidence of mass opinion backlash from these data, regardless of the institution (the legislature, court, or referendum) that instituted same-sex marriage and even among subgroups of the population, such as evangelicals or those with low levels of political sophistication, where opinion change is theoretically most likely to occur. Chapter 4 offers a series of observational studies, moving from hypothetical treatments of experiments toward real-world events. Again, whether it is the Massachusetts high court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, an announcement by President George W. Bush on the Federal Marriage Amendment, the 2004 decision by the California Supreme Court stopping gay marriages in San Francisco, or the Obergefell decision, there is little or no evidence of public opinion backlash. To conclude this section of the book, chapter 5 theorizes about the extent to which different sorts of institutions, be they legislatures, courts, executives, or direct democracy, might affect the prevalence of backlash. Analyzing observational data surrounding the Obama administration’s actions on gay marriage, as well as experimental evidence, the authors find no evidence that the type of institution that acts on gay rights policy affects the presence of backlash: indeed, there is just no evidence of backlash in the first place!

In chapters 6 and 7, the authors turn their attention to elite-led mobilization, seeking to provide an alternative to mass opinion backlash theory. Chapter 6 delivers a historical overview of gay rights in the United States, comparing the prevalence of backlash and elite-led mobilization. From this review, the authors see no real-world evidence of backlash but find substantial signs that elites have used gay rights policies to mobilize their supporters. Chapter 7 affords specific empirical tests of the elite-led mobilization theory, with particular attention to the 2010 anti-retention campaign against three Iowa Supreme Court justices after their ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. Discussing how there was no change in public support for same-sex marriage after the decision (contra backlash theory), the authors catalog how religious conservatives campaigned against the justices and present empirical evidence demonstrating that the Iowa justices fared worse in counties with a higher percentage of evangelical citizens. Finally, relying on campaign contribution data, the authors show that much of the Iowa anti-retention campaign was funded by national anti-gay interests. Chapter 8 concludes the book.

Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights is an important book, both for its clear-eyed conceptualization of backlash and the fresh elite-led mobilization theory it advances. The mix of experimental and observational evidence the authors amass convincingly dispels the notion that advances in gay rights are uniformly (or even usually) accompanied by a decline in public support against expansive rights protections for minorities. The interesting analysis the authors provide of elite action in response to the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 Varnum opinion illustrates how policy entrepreneurs can co-opt minority rights campaigns for their own ends.

Every single-issue study necessarily suggests a conversation about generalizability. The authors open the book citing studies across issue areas that invoke the concept of mass opinion backlash yet smartly train their attention in this book on gay rights. No single book can do everything; still, the question many readers will be left with at the end of the book is that of the extent to which the findings apply to areas other than gay rights. Future research should endeavor to answer whether elite-led mobilization explains other issues better than mass opinion backlash or whether some of the unique aspects of gay rights—perhaps especially the extremely quick and highly unusual trend toward public acceptance of gay rights in the 2010s—made public opinion backlash less applicable to the politics of gay rights, even as it might help us understand the politics of other rights campaigns. To be clear, understanding the politics of gay rights is an important end in and of itself, and Bishin and coauthors provide a convincing account of public opinion in this policy domain. By carefully elucidating the implications of two major theories, Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights sets the stage for other scholars to compare the presence (or absence) of backlash beyond gay rights.

Although the book’s arguments and conclusions are important for undergraduate and graduate students interested in public opinion, gay rights, and law and politics, this book should command a wide readership among activists and interest groups interested in expanding rights. As the authors point out, the wide acceptance of backlash theory has suggested to these groups a dispiriting model of social change: you may already be deprived of some of your rights, but if you try to improve your position, you risk losing even some of your current supporters. So, the best action is to stay in the closet and do not fight for your rights. By contrast, the gay rights movement—as masterfully explained by the authors—suggests the opposite story: groups can (and should) mobilize to advance their interests and can do so, win, and actually gain support. The public is not necessarily the enemy of these groups. The major contribution of this book—and one that deserves wide readership and citation—is that understanding the politics of rights-enhancing campaigns also requires understanding the actions of political entrepreneurs who opportunistically seek to use stigmatized groups as means to their own ends.