Description
The past decade has brought a veritable sea change for the civil rights of LGBT people on each continent. Yet, the ratification and observance of the civil rights of LGBT people have been nonetheless highly varied from one country to the next. Whether through formal adoption, segmentation, or glocalization, many aspects of international law express Weber's Iron Cage (ex. Hironaka 2016). Institutional analyses have shown the particular isomorphic tendency of legal frameworks, including LGBT civil rights (Frank 2010). This paper adds to this discourse by moving away from institution-heavy analyses to argue that elite-led mobilization for and against a legal program explains the nature of an international law's local adoption. Elite-led mobilization, where individual actors shape public sentiment through various means, has been convincingly used to explain opposition to expanding civil rights (Bishin et al 2021). Through a comparative study of LGBT civil rights regimes in North and South America, the positive and negative interests that spur elite-led mobilization created a hard-fought, domino effect despite any opposition.
