Teaching Democracies New Tricks: Same-Sex Unions and the Power of Social Learning

Since 1989 the vast majority of democracies in North America and Europe have implemented national same-sex unions policies that recognize such couples in law, making it one of the most salient and celebrated issues of identity politics in recent decades. The United States was one of the last established western democracies to implement such a law at the national level. A number of scholars have sought to explain the reasons behind this ‘US exceptionalism’ and why a country that gave rise to ‘gay pride’ in the 1970s became a laggard in LGBT rights expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s (Adam 2003; Smith 2009). In this paper we seek to challenge the idea that the underlying political dynamics of same-sex relationship recognition differ significantly in Europe and the US. We posit that in both regions the diffusion of SSU policies, and more recently laws that open marriage, has been significantly influenced and accelerated by processes of social learning and the strong demonstration effect exerted by early adopters. While certain domestic cultural, institutional and movement variables can act as brakes to SSU adoption in these democracies, they rarely act as complete barriers to reform in the face of widespread diffusion of these high-profile policies. US policymakers do seem to differ from their European counterparts in one key aspect, however; namely from whom they are willing to learn. Whereas European and other North American countries take inspiration from countries across the globe, policymakers in the US tend only to take their cues from jurisdictions within the US itself, primarily other US states. We test these hypotheses using event history analysis and an original dataset that contains measures for the 50 US states and 28 European Union countries (1985-2015).