Failed and successful attempts at institutional change: the battle for marriage equality in the United States

Abstract

By focusing on the legislative process underpinning marriage equality in the American states, this article identifies the combinations of conditions under which attempts at institutional displacement succeed or fail. Hitherto, few scholarly works have empirically examined displacement and whether, and how, actors can preserve institutional stability in the face of organized efforts to change institutions. Taking causal complexity into account, the analytical model factors in the resources of both change and status quo actors as well as the political context that enables or constrains their strategies. The results of the comparative analysis show that states have followed different paths to the displacement of heterosexual marriage in favor of marriage equality. Yet, most crucially, the findings pinpoint that the inclusion of religious exemption clauses is a condition sine qua non for marriage equality laws to be effectively passed, thus challenging the widely accepted notion that morality policies are foreign to compromise.

A roadmap to understanding restrictive immigration policy outcomes

“…Some of the "ingredients" considered in these recipes include different types of refusal on attempts to impose austerity measures, such as imperceptible dissent, disruptive public opposition, non-disruptive public opposition, and militant refusal. More recently, in her study examining the path to marriage quality in the United States, Mariani (2020) used QCA to explore how the combinations of various factors (e.g., strength of churches and religious interest groups, strength of LGBT interest groups, exemptions afforded to religious officials, and the existence of veto possibilities) lead to marriage equality.…”

Discursive Strategies and Sequenced Institutional Change: The Case of Marriage Equality in the United States

“…The decision did not just extend the unique rights and benefits associated with marriage to same-sex couples. More fundamentally, it replaced the traditional definition of marriage based on religious beliefs and natural law accounts with a more egalitarian, secular view of the institution that recognizes a couple’s long-term commitment regardless of sexual orientation (Mariani, 2020: 257).…”

“…In the past few years, exemptions on religious grounds for private and public actors have proliferated, yielding inequality in the distribution of the rights effectively afforded to same-sex and opposite-sex couples. As Table 1 summarizes, prior to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) most of these exemptions were included in state-level marriage equality laws (Mariani, 2020), while a few were enacted either as a reaction to or as a preemptive measure against the tidal wave of court rulings supporting marriage equality. By 2020, three states have adopted legislation exempting religious organizations from providing services to LGBT couples and the clergy from solemnizing same-sex marriages, and one state has granted government officials the right to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.…”

“…The latter include social norms about how intimate relationships, reproduction and children’s socialization should be organized (Lauer and Yodanis, 2010: 60) along with recurrent social practices—for example, family names, ceremonies, or rings. Since institutions are containers of moral values and templates (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 947) that determine which actions and behaviors are considered “right” or “wrong” (Hacker et al, 2015: 183; Streeck and Thelen, 2005: 9), authoritative decisions affecting the core values upon which the institution of marriage was founded, such as the adoption of marriage equality, can be regarded as an instance of institutional change (Mariani, 2020: 256).…”