I presented my paper entitled “An Unlikely Coalition: Passing the Respect for Marriage Act” in-person at the Pi Sigma Alpha‘s 2024 National Student Research Conference in Washington D.C. This project grew out of my final paper submitted for a POLSCI 109B (“Politics of Public Policy”) at UC Berkeley. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis.
Access the codebook, dataset, and replication code on GitHub here. Read the journal paper (with methodology and results) here.
Abstract: The Respect for Marriage Act (H.R.8404) is a landmark 2022 law that codified federal and interstate recognition of racial intermarriage and same-sex marriage. This paper asks why, despite previous iterations of the Respect for Marriage Act failing, marriage equality achieved success in 2022. With a focus on same-sex marriage, I review key policies in American history. I then move to discuss the premise of the Respect for Marriage Act itself. I then discuss the premise of the law itself. I argue that there were three key factors driving the law’s success: the Supreme Court, interest groups, and electoral politics. First, I argue that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision overturning abortion protections created urgency to codify interracial and same-sex marriage as it challenged the longstanding doctrine of stare decisis. Second, I argue that the broad coalition of interest groups supporting the law helped ground support for it from a variety of angles. Third, I argue that Republican members of Congress in competitive districts saw this law as an opportunity to take a policy position ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Together, they created the unlikely coalition in an otherwise polarized political environment to pass the Respect for Marriage Act.
Keywords: same-sex marriage, equality, judicial precedents, policy coalitions, re-election