When Do Legislators Defy Popular Sovereignty? Testing Theories of Minority Representation Using DOMA

• Date: 01 December 2013
• Author: Benjamin G. Bishin,Charles Anthony Smith
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912913475875
• Published date: 01 December 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

66(4) 794 –803

© 2013 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912913475875

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Article

Introduction

On September 21, 1996, Democratic President Bill

Clinton signed into law The Defense of Marriage Act

(DOMA), which allows states to avoid recognizing

same-sex marriages performed in other states and pro-

hibits the federal government from recognizing these

marriages at all. Denying gays the right to marry pre-

cludes them from receiving more than 1,000 federal

benefits, including, for example, the right to social secu-

rity survivor benefits. In so doing, Clinton joined with a

majority of the Democrats in the House (118/198) and

Senate (32/47) to deny a basic civil right to one of their

party’s staunchest allies, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

transgender (LGBT) community.1

The passage of this bill during an era of Republican

ascendancy is perhaps unsurprising. In 1996, Republicans

had solid majorities in both the House and Senate, and

the Democratic president had won with only 43 percent

of the vote. Since the mid-1960s, Republicans have

opposed extending civil rights to disadvantaged groups

at least partly because, as Hillygus and Shields (2008)

note, much of the Grand Old Party (GOP)’s southern

strategy was predicated on making race-based appeals to

recruit Democratic white southern voters to the GOP

(Phillips 1969). Specifically, Republicans stonewalled

advances in civil rights by propounding “states’ rights”

arguments that asserted that these decisions should be

left to the individual states (e.g., Karol 2009). This

approach served to delay the extension of federal law to

states and thereby impeded the large national majorities

that favored extending civil rights to African Americans.

More surprising is the opposition of leading Democrats

to gay marriage. DOMA was passed with the support of a

Democratic president and by a majority of Democrats in

each chamber. Democrats had, since the civil rights battles

of the 1960s, been the party of and for the extension of civil

rights to virtually all disenfranchised groups whether based

on race, ethnicity, gender, or age. On issues of gay rights,

however, many Democrats embraced the states’ rights

arguments most frequently advanced by Republicans.

Democrats’ unwillingness to extend a basic right to the

LGBT community raises important questions about the

representation process in the United States. Specifically,

why is it that on an issue so important to such a loyal group,

Democrats rejected their philosophical principles of strong

federal control and expansive civil rights to support legis-

lation that was harmful to their supporters?

475875PRQXXX10.1177/1065912913475875

Political Research QuarterlyBishin and Smith

1University of California–Riverside, USA

2University of California–Irvine, USA

Corresponding Author:

Charles Anthony Smith, Department of Political Science,

University of California–Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza,

Irvine CA 92697-5100, USA.

Email: casmith@uci.edu

When Do Legislators Defy Popular

Sovereignty? Testing Theories of

Minority Representation Using DOMA

Benjamin G. Bishin1 and Charles Anthony Smith2

Abstract

What explains the behavior of legislators on bills that restrict the rights of marginalized minorities? Studies of

representation typically focus on factors like party or public opinion but seldom account for theories of minority

representation like electoral capture or subconstituency politics. One reason for this is that data allowing for the

comparison of these theories are seldom available for U.S. House districts. We overcome this hurdle by implementing

multilevel regression with post-stratification to estimate opinion on gay marriage during the 1996 Defense of Marriage

Act vote. We show that subconstituency politics explains legislators’ behavior better than electoral capture, party, or

public opinion.

Keywords

representation, LGBT politics, congress, elections, DOMA