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The Politics of Marriage Equality: Confrontational Interest Groups and Nonconfrontational Officeholders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2020

Christopher Baylor Open the ORCID record for Christopher Baylor [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

The passage of marriage equality in Rhode Island offers insight into the role of organized groups and politicians in policymaking. Despite a Democratic legislature and popular support, marriage equality was initially defeated in 2011, in part due to concentrated opposition from the Catholic Church and the reluctance of Democratic officeholders to confront members of the same party on the issue. In the following primary elections, small interest groups in Rhode Island, with the help of national interest groups, helped raise the salience of marriage equality by campaigning against opponents, resulting in the release of a marriage equality bill from the Senate Judiciary Committee and its subsequent passage in a floor vote. One organized interest was responsible for blocking marriage equality in the legislature’s most significant bottleneck and different organized interests were responsible for enabling passage. The passage of marriage equality in Rhode Island shows that interest groups can enable as well as obstruct majority opinion.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 507 - 518
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

He would like to thank Shawn Patterson and John Zaller for inspiring this research and three anonymous reviewers for providing feedback at different stages. The William Steiger Fellowship provided funding to help finish this manuscript. Most of all, he thanks all of the interview subjects who took considerable time out of their schedules to meet with him and to answer questions thoughtfully.

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