Political and discursive opportunities for institutional changethe case of marriage equality in the United States

Résumé

This dissertation employs a multi-method research design to analyze the political and discursive opportunities for gradual institutional change in the case of marriage equality in the American states. It comprises three different, but interrelated research papers. The first article studies how party competition across different religious contexts shapes the political opportunities enabling institutional reform. It finds that party control of the state government determines policy output only in those states that are religiously more diverse. The second and third papers examine actors’ oppositional dynamics, with a special focus on how political and discursive resources enable or hinder institutional reform, respectively. The former identifies the conditions under which attempts at policy change succeed or fail and finds that morality policies are not foreign to compromise. The latter shows that actors’ discursive frames deployed at multiple political venues function as a mechanism of sequential institutional change, including layering, displacement and drift.