Senate Judiciary Committe Hearings on Marriage Equality

This article develops a theoretical framework to understand how sexuality can be institutionalised through debates about marriage equality. We first examine 13 Australian sporting organisations concerning their support for marriage equality and sexual minority inclusion before showing they drew cultural capital from supporting episodes of equality exogenous to their organisation, while failing to promote internal inclusion. We use online content analysis alongside the identification of institutional speech acts within policy to analyse results through three conceptual lenses: Ahmed’s institutional diversity work, Ogburn’s cultural lag, and Evan’s organisational lag, from which we propose a hybrid – organisational cultural lag – as a theoretical tool within social movement theory.

Download Full-text

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

Political Studies ◽

10.1177/00323217211020581 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 003232172110205

Author(s):

Giulia Mariani ◽

Tània Verge

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Institutional Change ◽

The United States ◽

Marriage Equality ◽

Agent Based ◽

Discursive Strategies ◽

Policy Debates ◽

The Status ◽

Private Actors

Building on historical and discursive institutionalism, this article examines the agent-based dynamics of gradual institutional change. Specifically, using marriage equality in the United States as a case study, we examine how actors’ ideational work enabled them to make use of the political and discursive opportunities afforded by multiple venues to legitimize the process of institutional change to take off sequentially through layering, displacement, and conversion. We also pay special attention to how the discursive strategies deployed by LGBT advocates, religious-conservative organizations and other private actors created new opportunities to influence policy debates and tip the scales to their preferred policy outcome. The sequential perspective adopted in this study allows problematizing traditional conceptualizations of which actors support or contest the status quo, as enduring oppositional dynamics lead them to perform both roles in subsequent phases of the institutional change process.

Download Full-text