How Does Party Position Change Happen? The Case of Gay Rights in the U.S. Congress July 2012 (an earlier version of this paper was presented at the January 2012 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, in New Orleans, Louisiana) By David Karol
[email protected] 301.405.0906 Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland Abstract Democrats and Republicans are increasingly divided on questions of gay rights. Debate exists about the mechanism producing such party position change among elected officials. Some scholars claim that fears of seeming inconsistent keep politicians from changing their stands, so party position change occurs chiefly via turnover among elected officials. Yet using both co-sponsorship and roll-call data from the U.S. Congress, I find that both mechanisms underlie party position change on gay rights, with conversion playing a leading role. However unlike other “social” issues on which the parties have divided such as gun control and abortion, almost all the change on gay rights has occurred within the Democratic Party. As gay rights activists became more prominent in the Democratic Party Democratic incumbents adapted and took new stands, creating a partisan divide on the issue. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of how party position change occurs. “Attitudes evolve, including mine.” – President Barack Obama on same-sex marriage. October 27, 2010.1 The apparent stability of the American two-party system reveals much fluidity on close inspection. If the Democrats and Republicans seem immortal, their policies and electoral coalitions are far less stable. Interest in how and why these changes occur has animated the realignment literature (Burnham 1970, Sundquist 1983), studies of “issue evolution” (Carmines and Stimson 1989, Adams 1997, Stimson 2004) and “party position change” (Wolbrecht 2000, Karol 2009.) I focus here on the question of how party positioning on gay or LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual) rights changed in Congress.