Somewhere Over the Rainbow : LGBTQ+ Policy Advancements in Southern Africa

In recent years, LGBTQ+ legal reforms—including same-sex marriage laws and non-discrimination protections—have been increasingly enacted around the world. In many countries, this progress has occurred despite the presence of a disapproving public, an unsupportive legislature, and/or other unexpected factors. Why then do these rights progress, when the traditional behavioralist ingredients for legal reform are not present? To date, no major explanations have been substantiated in the existing literature. This dissertation proposes a novel way of conceptualizing these key policy advances. I demonstrate by way of a cross-national quantitative analysis, employing an original data set, that LGBTQ+ rights measures’ success are driven by an interaction of judicial review with robust civil society participation. Activists’ cogent organizing efforts, as well as their interactive work with independent judiciaries entrenched with judicial review powers, has significantly greater determinative capacity in advancing LGBTQ+ rights than what the public believes should be law or which party dominates the legislature. I explore these mechanisms in greater depth through three qualitative case studies of the Southern African region. In-depth interviews with activists, lawyers, journalists, and other elites in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in these countries, provide rich contextualization explaining the key processes at play. These three cases are ideal for comparison because they are broadly similar across a variety of metrics, including demographics and a history of racial apartheid, and yet have widely divergent outcomes, from the highly progressive laws of South Africa to the repression of Zimbabwe. My research challenges existing preconceptions of where and why LGBTQ+ rights succeed and proposes a new understanding of how activists can best advance their own equality agenda. More broadly, this dissertation also generates an innovative approach to understanding policy change that unites social institutions with formal institutions. Finally, these findings also have implications for other rights movements, including abortion rights, as activists can advance countermajoritarian issue agendas through the courts.