Last month saw the publication of the latest set of reports from the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The latest report comes in the form of a series of chapters on various topics. As part of my current research, I need to read through and analyse these chapters and so I’m writing my notes up on some of these chapters as semi-formal analyses (including some of my provisional thoughts and suppositions that are not necessarily fully worked out yet), beginning with ‘A liberalisation in attitudes’ by Elizabeth Clery, which is concerned with ‘moral issues’, by which is meant topics such as abortion, sex outside marriage, same-sex relationships and trans rights. ‘Moral issues’, especially in the narrow sense of the word ‘moral’, seems an old-fashioned term to apply to issues that many would regard as human rights. However, the broader sense of the word moral suggests values that exceed narrow materialistic cost-benefit analysis. This is a topic I will be writing about in detail in the future, but for the moment I’ll just say that in this broader sense, the moral basis of politics is a terrain of struggle (with a history) and the question of whether it is becoming liberalised or not is key to thinking about contemporary politics and ideas of culture wars.
The website summary of ‘BSA 40: A liberalisation in attitudes?’ notes some indicative changes:
While we are much more accepting of non-traditional family forms and sexual relationships than we were four decades ago, there is no clear consensus regarding the acceptability of various family forms when children are involved.
81% think it is all right for a couple to live together without being married, up from 64% in 1994.
67% think a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is never wrong, compared with 17% in 1983.
45% disagree that people who want children ought to get married (24% agree) and 50% agree one parent can bring up a child as well as two (31% disagree).
People are more likely to think an abortion should be allowed in a range of circumstances compared with four decades ago, although there is less universal support when there is no health risk involved.
Support for an abortion being allowed in circumstances when the woman decides on her own that she does not want to have a child has risen from 37% in 1983 to 76% now.
Most people think abortion should be allowed when the woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy (95%) or when there is a strong chance of the baby having a serious health condition (89%); 72% express this view when the couple cannot afford any more children and 68% when the woman does not wish to marry the man.
Generational Effects, Age Effects, and Period Effects
In ‘A liberalisation in attitudes?’, Elizabeth Clery writes:
A number of developments have been identified to explain the long-term liberalisation in moral attitudes in Britain: changes in the prevalence of certain characteristics associated with more or less liberal views (typically levels of education and religiosity); changes in how wider society deals with specific moral issues (in terms of policy, legislation, and popular discussion and debate); and changes in individual behaviour (that might make it more likely that a person would have direct experience of a particular moral issue). By exploring the nature and timing of shifts in attitudes to each moral issue, the universality of these shifts across society and the evolving views of different generations, we will seek to assess which of these broad sets of factors best explains the liberalisation of attitudes that has occurred in each instance, and whether any broad conclusions can be drawn regarding the process of liberalisation in Britain, or whether change needs to be understood in relation to the nuances of each individual issue. (p.5 of the PDF version available at the link above)
More specifically, measurable social change can be various ascribed to a ‘generational effect’ (in which older more conservative generations die off and are replaced by younger more liberal ones), an ‘age effect’ (with all generations’ views shifting in a consistent direction as they age), or a ‘period effect’ (with a change at the societal level affecting the views of all generations at the same time) (see p.9). In practice, though, the changes that Clery looks like do not turn on an ‘age effect’. I’m not going to summarise all the analysis in the chapter but pick out the conclusions as to what mechanisms are driving which particular social changes.
While the rise in acceptance across society of different family forms over the past three or four decades might suggest a period effect, ‘the liberalisation in attitudes towards people having children outside of marriage has primarily been driven by generational replacement. [The data] clearly shows that the views of individual generations have changed little over the lifecourse, with societal change being largely driven by the replacement of older, less supportive generations, with younger, more supportive, ones’ (p.18):
How might we explain this pattern? We have seen that affiliating with particular religious faiths is strongly associated with views in this area, so we may be witnessing the declining importance of religious ideologies across society as a whole. Alternatively, it may be that, as each generation comes of age, their attitudes to family forms are influenced by those they see around them, and those being adopted by their own peer group (with cohabitation and lone parenthood being increasingly common among younger generations). It may be that attitudes to family forms are determined at this formative stage, and change little throughout the subsequent life-course, as individuals move forward with their own selected family forms. If this is the case and, coupled with a likely continued decline in religiosity, then we might expect to see support for alternative family forms increase in the future, assuming that their prevalence within society continues to increase or, at least, remains stable. (p.20)
In contrast, while support for same-sex relationships also correlates to combinations of religious affiliation, education and age, which means that a generational effect has led to a majority acceptance of same-sex relationships, period effects have also made a significant difference (see pp.26-7). Support has increased as same-sex relationships have become more visible in society and have received greater legislative endorsement, but tended to dip when legislation and public discussion has treated them negatively (as in the 1980s). These entwined causes play out in different ways, as can be seen by first examining attitudes to premarital sex, which follow a similar pattern to that observed in relation to support for different family forms:
In general, the views of individual generations have remained relatively static over time, with the driving force of change being the replacement of older, less supportive, generations, by younger, more supportive ones. However, given the very similar trajectories in attitudes exhibited by generations born in the 1950s and beyond, the power of generational replacement to drive societal change has become much more limited in the last decade or so. (p.27)
In other words, most people born after 1950 don’t have an issue with premarital sex and therefore, there is now a limited scope for further liberalisation of attitudes because once the pre-1950 generation is no longer with us, the ongoing replacement of generations won’t involve any shift in attitudes. While generational replacement is similarly driving support for same-sex relationships (although not uniformly stretching back so far), ‘there is also considerable evidence of a societal effect; with the support of all generations increasing substantially from the 1990s, when the legislative position and public discussion in relation to same-sex relationships became rather more positive than it had been previously’ (p.28). In this case, however, because there is a greater level of acceptance among younger generations, we can expect to see acceptance increasing further in future decades. Clery concludes that ‘it may simply be that generational effects, compared with period effects, take longer to materialise’ (p.28). This suggests that immediate state and media legitimation can swing public opinion faster than the longer term (but still rapid when considered within a wider historical context) generational effect.
In further contrast, increasing liberalisation in attitudes towards abortion does not appear to have been driven directly by generational replacement, but by levels of education (‘The proportion of people believing that abortion should be allowed if the woman decides on her own that she does not want a child has increased by 36 percentage points among those with a degree since 1985, compared with an increase of just 13 percentage points for those with no qualifications’ [p.33]) and (lack of) religious affiliation. Although, of course, levels of education and religiosity are themselves related to generation, with each generation known to be more educated and less religious than the one that preceded it. Clery concludes that ‘we cannot simply assume that abortion will continue to become more widely accepted as older generations die off; societal structures and popular discussion and, perhaps, individual behaviour, clearly matter and are likely to continue to have a role to play moving forward’ (p.34).
The Liberalisation of Social Attitudes is Not a Straightforward Across-the-Board Process
All of the above analysis leads to an initial summing up concerning the liberalisation of social attitudes over the past 40 years. There is clearly hard evidence of a liberalisation in attitudes to ‘moral issues’, as Clery terms them. However, this is not a straightforward across-the-board process. One area where attitudes have not shifted at all is in relation to extra-marital sex. Furthermore, as we have seen, ‘While much of the liberalisation in attitudes can simply be explained by generational replacement, we also see strong evidence of period effects, particularly in relation to attitudes to homosexual relationships and to abortion’ (p.35).
Clery completes her analysis by considering ‘attitudes to a more contemporary moral issue – people who are transgender – and how we might understand these – given this broader knowledge base, and without the benefit of a longer time series’ (p.35). At this point, I should note that I am not entirely happy either with using trans people as a kind of case study to demonstrate how this analysis might function or with equating trans people to a moral issue in themselves. This latter is different to discussing attitudes to same-sex relationships: there is a shift to actually considering where people in themselves might be the problem here (or to put it another way, most of this type of analysis takes care to try and separate the ‘issue’ from actual people, but if you make the existence of trans people into an issue in its own right, then it becomes impossible to separate the issue from the people, and so in effect you are polling people on whether they think other people have a right to exist – and, at the very least, there needs to be some acknowledgement and attempted mediation of this. Ideally, there would be a different way of framing this research, perhaps in relation to trans rights rather than trans people themselves). It is clear, however, that it is the apparent rapid reversal of liberal attitudes in this case which is why it is chosen as a point of comparison. Returning again to the website summary of ‘BSA 40: A liberalisation in attitudes?’:
Attitudes towards people who are transgender have become markedly less liberal over the past three years.
64% describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender, a decline of 18 percentage points since 2019 (82%).
Just 30% think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53% in 2019.
While women, younger people, the more educated and less religious express more liberal views towards people who are transgender, these views have declined across all demographic groups.
This section of the chapter notes the 2018 UK Government public consultation exploring, for England and Wales, the possibility of removing the requirement for someone who wanted to change their gender of having a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The results of that consultation, published in September 2020, suggested wide support for all aspects of reform, with 64% of respondents in favour of removing the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and 80% in favour of removing the requirement for a medical report. However, as we know, the UK Government nevertheless abandoned the proposed legislation (although still a Conservative Government, it was in fact abandoned by the very different post-December-2019 administration to the one that initially proposed the legislation). The chapter notes that ‘Policy in Scotland followed a similar direction, but instead of abandoning the idea, the Scottish Government steered legislation through the Scottish Parliament, though its proposals became the subject of considerable controversy (Scottish Parliament 2022)’ (p.36). The phrasing here – ‘instead of abandoning the idea’ – is curious because given the positive nature of response to the Scottish consultations (they held not one but two, the first being from November 2017 to March 2018, with 60% of those responding being in favour of introducing a self-declaratory system for legal gender recognition, and the second from December 2019 to March 2020, in which again the majority of respondents supported the proposed reform), legislating with cross-party support was the logical step. As noted, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was passed by the Scottish Parliament and then blocked by the UK Government’s unprecedented use of a Section 35 order (a legal clause framed strongly in terms of UK national security), a move which has since been challenged in the Courts (I discuss the blocking of the GRR Bill and the legal challenge to that in the penultimate section of my Autumn 2023 Dispatch from the Culture War in the UK).
The BSA found that:
While around two-thirds (64%) describe themselves as “not at all prejudiced” against people who are transgender, almost three in ten describe themselves as being “a little prejudiced” with more than one in twenty describing themselves as “very prejudiced”. Invariably, social desirability may limit the extent to which people are willing to admit to prejudice within the context of social research (although its impact is likely to have reduced with the transition of the survey to an online mode in 2020). We have asked a comparable item about prejudice towards “people of other races” since 1983. It is interesting to note that the proportion describing themselves as not at all prejudiced against people of other races was 83% in 2019, the last occasion on which this question was asked. This implies that more people are prejudiced towards people who are transgender – or at least perceive it to be socially acceptable to admit to this. (p.38)
Overall, the proportion adopting the liberal position has diminished sharply since 2016 and this is clearly due to a period effect: ‘These changes in attitudes are substantial, and their direction and timing suggest that they have been largely triggered by the intense political debate and media discussion on both sides of the border regarding the easing of the circumstances in which someone can be diagnosed as transgender (and thus allowed to reflect this on their birth certificate).’ (p.39) However, ‘views towards people who are transgender are not uniform across different sections of society. We see that women, younger age groups, those with higher levels of educational qualifications and those who do not affiliate with a particular religion are more likely to express liberal views towards people who are transgender’ (p.40). In particular, ‘71% of women describe themselves as not at all prejudiced against people who are transgender, compared with 57% of men’ (p.40). Clery concludes this section of the analysis by making the important point that ‘we may be seeing a period effect similar to that which we witnessed in the 1980s for attitudes to homosexual relationships, with the emergence of HIV-AIDS and the introduction of Section 28 [contributing to much more negative attitudes to same-sex relationships than those displayed today]’ (p.42).
The substantial impact of this period effect makes it difficult to predict how attitudes to trans rights will evolve in the future. Clery adds, somewhat ambiguously, ‘Previous analysis suggests that progressive policymaking may alter people’s views – but it may in fact be the case that policy-making has moved too far beyond the public consensus in the past three years, instead provoking a backlash’ (p.42). It is not clear where this idea of a ‘backlash’ comes from other than the media. Nor is it clear why the threat of a backlash (which by their nature tend to be driven by a few loud voices) is somehow a useful indicator of public opinion or social attitudes. What does appear to be the case is that period effects, resulting from intense political and media pressure, can overcome generational effects and reverse liberalisation in specific instances for at least a short while.
The final section of this chapter develops the idea that characterising the last four decades as involving a ‘liberalisation in moral attitudes’ is something of a simplification:
Two Areas where Attitudes have Not Moved in a Liberal Direction
In this regard, it is worth focusing, in particular, on those two areas where attitudes have not moved in a liberal direction – namely attitudes towards extra-marital sex and towards people who are transgender. To what extent are attitudes in these areas associated with attitudes to other moral issues, and, in the case of extra-marital sex, if there is a substantial association, why then have attitudes not followed the general trend of becoming more liberal over time? (p.43)
Off the top of my head, I would have said the key difference between attitudes to extra-marital sex and, say, premarital sex, would be that many people would see the former as ‘cheating’ and some form of personal betrayal. However, the points made here that ‘almost everyone (99%) who thinks that pre-marital sex is always wrong, also thinks that extra-marital sex is always wrong’ (p.44) and that ‘clearly, disagreement with the idea that sex outside of marriage is acceptable is, to some degree, upholding high levels of disapproval regarding extra-marital sex’ (p.44) also indicate a level of residual belief that sex should within be marriage that doesn’t entirely tally with the notion of increasing liberalism reflected in some of the other statistics. However, these associations are slowly getting weaker over time, even if the headline figures aren’t changing (which makes me wonder if the figures are not entirely rooted in moral aversion but in a more mundane sense of ‘it happens, but we think it’s wrong’ which might be considered a form of acceptance). A similar pattern – i.e., more traditionally minded people are much less liberal – emerges when we look at levels of prejudice against trans people:
43% of people who think that same-sex relationships are always wrong describe themselves as very prejudiced towards people who are transgender, compared with 27% of those who think that they are mostly wrong, and 5%, 1% and 1% of those who think that they are sometimes, rarely or never wrong. Clearly, these data suggest that attitudes to non-traditional sexual relationships are strongly associated with attitudes to non-traditional identities. However, the relationship between attitudes to people who are transgender and attitudes to abortion (two moral issues which are conceptually some way apart) is less marked. In each instance, people who oppose an abortion being allowed are more likely to describe themselves as prejudiced towards people who are transgender, compared with those who think that abortions should be allowed. Most markedly, 26% of those who think an abortion should not be allowed if a woman’s health is seriously endangered by a pregnancy describe themselves as very prejudiced towards people who are transgender, compared with 5% of those who think an abortion should be allowed in these circumstances (with the proportions of each group describing themselves as “not prejudiced at all” standing at 64% and 47% respectively). (p.46)
This correlation suggests to me that the opposition to liberalism is not necessarily entirely down to traditional and religious attitudes but may also lie in people who define themselves against liberalism because they are self-consciously culturally conservative in a modern sense. This would be difficult to unpack because many of these people might also espouse traditional and religious values (this is the kind of area that might require qualitative analysis to suggest what is happening). Overall, though, religiosity is declining, and this is one of the factors that has fed into the liberalisation that has undoubtedly occurred despite the nuances detected in this chapter, including the oscillation between generational and period effects which has led to the situation in which:
while our attitudes have tended to become gradually more liberal when being driven by generational replacement, resulting from declines in religiosity, a rise in education and long-term changes in individual behaviour, our attitudes to homosexual relationships have fluctuated in response to how society has dealt with this issue, with the same trend currently being apparent in relation to people who are transgender. (p.47)
Why Saying ‘Future Trends Are Difficult to Predict’ is Missing the Point
The chapter ends by stating again that future trends are difficult to predict because of this tendency of short-term period effects to create rapid swings in public opinion. The final sentence, however, reveals the limitations of this logic, because it reverts to imputing an inherent resistance in the public to trans rights, which policymakers should take heed of:
Whilst homosexual relationships are now widely accepted and supported legislatively, with little apparent reason for this support to decline, we might conclude that policymakers need to take on board the current divided state of attitudes towards people who are transgender, when developing future policy on this issue, if they wish for it, and public attitudes, to ultimately move in a more liberal direction. (p.48)
This leaves a slightly bad taste at the end of this particular chapter because it denies the period effects of legalisation and policymaking that are elsewhere seen in this chapter as positively reinforcing liberalisation. However, there is also the question of political context to consider here. Let us return to Clery’s point, quoted above, that in the decline of positive attitudes to trans issues since 2019 ‘we may be seeing a period effect similar to that which we witnessed in the 1980s for attitudes to homosexual relationships, with the emergence of HIV-AIDS and the introduction of Section 28 [contributing to much more negative attitudes to same-sex relationships than those displayed today]’ (p.42). One thing that that the 1980s and post-2019 Conservative Governments have in common was that they were both overtly reactionary and trumpeted their reaction as part of their political appeal to voters. This is not to say that other UK Governments have not enacted reactionary legislation (especially in relation to immigration) but they have generally sought not to be seen as reactionary and attempted to present liberal credentials (e.g., Cameron sought to throw off the mantle of the ‘nasty party’). However, in the 1980s, Thatcher explicitly endorsed Victorian and family values, and notoriously said that there was no such thing as society. Since 2019, the Tory Government has reverted to what are now seen as ‘culture war’ lines. Indeed, during the period when I have been writing this piece, the current UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has deliberately leant into the culture war in his leader’s speech at the Tory Party Conference by saying ‘And we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t; a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense’ (Wed 4 October 2023). It hardly needs saying that this is not just displaying prejudice against trans people but explicitly denying that they even exist. As such, it is an open declaration of extremism and the lack of willingness on behalf of the UK media to report it as such is itself indicative of the ongoing collapse of democratic norms.
If we think about this political context clearly, it must raise some questions for the BSA. For most of its existence the BSA has coincided with a period in which liberalisation of social attitudes has generally been seen as a public good. Therefore, sociologists and those conducting social surveys have been able to take a fairly neutral approach in reporting on British social attitudes and assigning changes to generational effects or period effects. However, it is not clear to me that when a government pursues extreme forms of reaction, as the Tories did in the 1980s with family/Victorian values and are again with the post-2019 culture war, that the effect it has on social attitudes can be described as that of a normal period effect. In these cases, we’re not talking about the positive reinforcement and legitimation of liberalising attitudes that were in any case spreading through the population by generational effect. What we are actually seeing in these cases, is the deliberate attempt both to suppress certain forms of behaviour and identity and to reverse the processes of social liberalisation. Objectively, we are talking about oppressive governments and therefore we cannot legitimate them by normalising their effect on social attitudes as just another valid process. It is exactly this question which is at stake in the ‘culture war’. The ‘culture war’ is often discussed as a distraction designed to split people apart and draw their attention away from more direct economic and political forms of struggle in which common cause needs to be made, but this is miss that the ‘culture war’ has a direct aim in itself: the validation of repressive, authoritarian government.
This is why arguing that the tendency of period effects to trump generational effects means that ‘future trends are difficult to predict’ is a cop out. Actually, it is fairly clear from this chapter that a liberalisation of social attitudes has been the general trend in the UK over the past 40 years and that this has been driven by generational effects and sometimes reinforced by period effects. The two counter examples – attitudes to same-sex relationships in the 1980s and post-2019 attitudes to trans rights – were not due to regular period effects but the effect of deliberately oppressive and reactionary government. To be clear, this kind of government is by its nature inherently undemocratic. Democracy is not just majority rule but a pluralistic system that supports minority rights and aims to maximise individual freedoms for its citizens within the operations of that system. If we assume the continuance of democracy in this sense, then I think we can predict that the liberalisation of attitudes seen prior to 2019 will continue due to the effects described in Clery’s chapter. By saying that ‘future trends are difficult to predict’, the implication is that this is a matter that is up in the air. It would be more accurate to state explicitly that a repressive government could reverse some of this liberalisation, which is what we are currently seeing happening to measurable extent in the case of attitudes towards trans rights. The problem with ignoring this explicit political context is that it then leaves a space concerning what is driving this social change that needs to be filled by some plausible-sounding explanation. Hence, we see in this chapter the invocation of public backlash to policy makers and the unfortunate and tellingly syntactically twisted closing line of the chapter, which is quoted above. Public attitudes are split because there has been a sustained and aggressive reactionary culture war fought on the issue. Without acknowledgment of the fact it is impossible to provide a balanced analysis of the liberalisation of social attitudes in Britain.
Social Humanities 