When do Local Governments Discriminate?
Lessons from the Diffusion of “LGBT Free Zones” in Poland
Matthew Stenberg (UC Berkeley), Conor O’Dwyer (University of Florida, Gainesville)
There is a long history of municipal governments worldwide passing resolutions, laws, and regulations governing discrimination and anti-discrimination. These cities are increasingly stylized as “human rights cities,” where municipal governments seek to protect civil rights of their residents: examples include sanctuary city movements, passing municipal versions of international law, and instituting laws to protect LGBTIQ citizens. In short, cities have emerged as a critical space for civil society to protect human rights, which is especially important given the increasing prevalence of repressive laws targeting minority groups in many authoritarian and backsliding countries.
At the same time, however, cities are also a space where human rights can be deliberately limited and that repression can instead be furthered. Cities have passed discriminatory laws in both Europe and the United States, and informal discrimination by local government actors is found in a variety of urban settings worldwide. Thus, local politics is also an arena where some seek to legally discriminate against minority groups. In our paper “When Do Local Governments Discriminate,” we try to understand why some cities are likely to implement laws that discriminate against some of their citizens and residents, and why others are not.
To better understand where such discriminatory policies are implemented, we examine the diffusion of so-called “LGBT Free Zones” across Poland between 2019 and 2020, where governments at all three subnational levels in Poland (municipality, county, and region) passed anti-LGBTIQ resolutions based on common templates. These declarations of “freedom from LGBT ideology” and “Charters of Family Rights” symbolically targeted LGBTIQ residents, accusing them of attempting a cultural revolution in Poland “attack[ing] freedom of speech, the innocence of children, the authority of families and schools, as well as the freedom of entrepreneurs.” These ordinances illustrate how subnational governments may reproduce authoritarian structures of national politics; after all, during this time, Poland’s governing Law and Justice party (PiS) was gaining notoriety for presiding over national-level democratic backsliding and for using political homophobia as a rhetorical strategy to undergird its support.
We statistically analyze all local governments in Poland, including data about their political and socioeconomic situation. We find that the diffusion of these resolutions was associated with partisan control of local governments by the Law and Justice party, which regularly used political homophobia in its campaign and governing rhetoric at the national level. One contribution of our paper is to show that political homophobia, which is typically seen as a phenomenon spreading between national states, is increasingly spreading within them, i.e. subnationally.
Our finding that local partisan control is paramount is surprising for two reasons: first, because Polish local politics have not historically been especially partisan; and second, because we control for PiS’s performance in national elections. Thus, the effect is not simply from PiS’s ideas being popular in a particular municipality but instead a specific institutional effect for affiliates of PiS controlling the mayoralty and the city council. The strength of these local political networks is associated with the greatest likelihood of local governments’ implementing discriminatory policies: institutional control, not “demand-side,” bottom-up support from the local population, is key. This finding illustrates that local partisan politics and institutional control may accelerate discriminatory rhetoric at the national level into policy and underscores the importance of better understanding local and subnational politics as a vehicle for furthering national political agendas. Moreover, it also demonstrates ways that local governments may even push ahead of national governments in moving discriminatory policy forward.
Our finding that the cultural and sociodemographic characteristics of a city’s population do not explain which cities are likely to implement a “zone” runs counter to the conventional wisdom that sees cities as the bastions of liberalism and villages of social conservatism. This further complicates the “culture war” frame in which antigay policies are commonly analyzed. Instead, a conscious utilization of local political institutions as a partisan strategy is necessary to drive this process.
Our analysis also offers lessons about how the example of immediate neighbors impacts the diffusion of discriminatory policies. We find that having a neighboring “zone” makes a city more likely to bring the political issue to the agenda so that its council actively discusses a proposal. If a city’s region or county implements a zone, that city is more likely to implement one. This accords with the notion of moral panics and the danger of the mainstreaming of intolerant views. On the other hand, we also find that a neighboring “zone” increases the likelihood of said municipality rejecting a “zone” of its own (after discussing it); this is likely a response to unwanted outside criticism. Those cities that implemented “zones” drew widespread criticism and became focal points for mobilizing Poland’s LGBTIQ movement and its allies, and their neighbors had a front-row view of the blowback.
While we focus on Poland to investigate counter-trends to “human-rights cities” in a controlled setting, this is not only an issue facing Poland, and Law and Justice’s ultimate defeat in Poland’s October 2023 elections does not reduce the importance of understanding discriminatory diffusion at the subnational level. Contemporary state-level American examples show that such policies are being openly pursued in other subnational jurisdictions as well. Thus, the experience of Poland’s municipalities holds lessons well beyond their local borders.
Matthew Stenberg is an institutional research analyst in the Graduate Division and Emerging Scholar Affiliate with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also received his PhD in Political Science. His research interests include local electoral politics, multilevel governance, subnational political institutions, and democratic decline.
Conor O’Dwyer is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of Coming Out of Communism: The Emergence of LGBT Activism in Eastern Europe (New York University Press, 2018).