How Social Movements Matter: Including Sexual Orientation in State-Level Hate Crime Legislation

State‐Level Determinants of Hate Crime Reporting: Examining the Impact of Structural and Social Movement Influences

“…While federal and state actors have passed legislation since the 1960s defining hate crimes and how they are enforced, sexual orientation was not incorporated into state hate crime legislation until the 1980s (Jenness and Grattet 2001; Herek ). LGBT social movement organizations specifically, and the gay liberation movement generally, played a central role in the passage of these policies at the federal and state level (Parris and Scheuerman ; Herek )…”

“…For instance, Kenneth Andrews () finds that membership in SMOs facilitated the implementation of federal poverty programs in Mississippi, as these entities affected the levels of funding local counties received. Moreover, the increased presence of LGBT organizations within a state promotes LGBT rights at the state level (Haider‐Markel and Meier ) and the likelihood that a state will include sexual orientation as a protected status in hate crime legislation (Parris and Scheuerman ). For instance, in a study examining the influence of legal change on gay and lesbian mobilization, Melinda Kane (, 263) argues that “organizations are a key resource for social movements; they pool resources, coordinate action, and, if maintained during movement lulls, facilitate the later resurgence of activism.” The amount of resources held by these organizations may then reflect the degree to which a state directs assets toward implementation of hate crime laws (McVeigh, Welch, and Bjarnason ; McVeigh, Neblett, and Shafiq ).…”

“…Political opportunities include political openness to the demands of social movements (Amenta and Halfmann ), the feasibility of governments passing policies to reflect those demands (McCammon et al ), as well as the presence of sympathetic elites in positions of power and splits between political elites (Kane , ). Regarding these former types of political opportunities, the existence of political allies and larger structural opportunities within the polity have fostered the expansion of LGBT rights (Haider‐Markel and Meier ) and the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate crime policy (Grattet, Jenness, and Curry ; Jenness ; Parris and Scheuerman ).…”

“…However, law enforcement agencies that participate in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) indicate that, nationally, only 1,263 hate crimes based on sexual orientation were reported in 2015 (UCR ) . Thus, the passage of anti‐LGBT hate crime legislation (Jenness and Grattet ; Parris and Scheuerman ; Herek ) does not necessarily translate into policy enforcement (Dwyer ; Grattet and Jenness ), providing a good case study for investigating the conditions under which ongoing social movement pressure leads to successful implementation of existing policy.…”

“…In doing so, we extend the literature on hate crime enforcement in multiple ways. First, we examine whether SMO‐related factors known to facilitate policy passage—that is, the strength of LGBT organizations and businesses (Werum and Winders ; Kane ; Soule ; Agnone ; Johnson ; Olzak and Soule ; Parris and Scheuerman )—can be similarly applied to policy implementation (see also Haider‐Markel ). Disentangling the mechanisms influencing policy passage and implementation can help differentiate symbolic policy gains from long‐term policy impact (Amenta et al ).…”