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

Abstract

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.