The Same-Sex Unions Revolution in Western Democracies: International Norms and Domestic Policy Change by Kelly Kollman

Author:Kelly Kollman [Kollman, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Political Freedom, Lesbian Studies
ISBN: 9781526112200
Google: i3C5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17331645
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Catalysing policy change: national SSU debates, international socialisation and the mechanisms of influence

This section examines the ways in which the relationship recognition debates and policy outcomes in Germany and the Netherlands have been affected by international socialisation and the SSU norm described in Chapter 4. By tracing the influence that the norm has had in individual countries, we can shed light not only on the extent but also the mechanisms by which these processes of international influence have catalysed SSU policy change in domestic settings. As I argued in Chapter 3, the ‘ideas’ literature in comparative politics developed by scholars such as Peter Hall and Vivien Schmidt can be of great help in fleshing out these domestic translation processes (Hall, 1993; Schmidt, 2002). Of particular importance is Hall’s much used notion of policy paradigm shifts. Hall reminds us that far-reaching policy change – the kind in which scholars of international socialisation generally are interested – often results from the replacement of old ideas by a new paradigm that redefines core policy goals. Unlike ‘normal’ modes of policymaking in which government officials adjust settings and/or instruments to reach fixed goals, paradigm shifts are likely to be more sociological than scientific in nature as the belief systems that underpin a paradigm cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence alone. Rather norms and changing notions of what is proper carry the day (Hall, 1993: 276–81). Hall and other scholars of paradigms thus lend constructivists the key insight that it is the rare international norm that meets a domestic policy blank slate. Making a new norm ‘fit’ with domestic institutions, constitutional principles and national cultures is just half the battle. The policy discourses that international norms either induce or augment do not merely have to persuade national publics and elites of the merits of the new norm, they have to demonstrate that the proposed change is so superior that it is worth dismantling entrenched ways of doing things in the field.

The SSU norm is no exception. Family policy and state relationship recognition in western societies are not new. Demanding that the state recognise same-sex couples is, however, and it necessitates that states re-think the purpose of family policy. Until very recently the central goal of the field was to promote a specific cultural institution, the traditional nuclear family. The legitimacy of the traditional family policy goal, of course, has been undermined over the past five decades by the secularisation of western societies, falling marriage and rising divorce rates as well as by the increasing diversity of lived family forms. As a result many western states have sought to reform family policy to meet changes in social mores and structures by making divorce easier and less punitive, erasing the legal differences between husbands and wives in marriage law and, in some countries, by extending a number of the legal benefits that married couples enjoy to non-married, cohabitating different-sex couples. None of these changes, however, challenged the core goals of traditional family policy in the same way as same-sex unions.

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