Leveraging Legitimacy: Institutional Work and Change in the Case of Same-Sex Marriage1

Institutions draw strict boundaries around included groups of people, and changing them typically requires professional advocating and lobbying work to introduce new laws or policies. Institutional scholars focus almost exclusively on how skilled, organizational actors initiate these changes, giving scant attention to what happens next. Yet legal or policy-driven change often occurs before there is widespread public approval for, or understanding of, it. How do we get from legal change to social change at normative and cognitive levels? Drawing on interview and survey data with 116 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer individuals who gained access to legal marriage, this article shows how beneficiaries of legal change do the institutional work necessary to transform it into something that carries social advantages. LGBQ individuals used legal inclusion to expand understandings of marriage and delegitimize continuing disrespect. I name this leveraging-legitimacy work and argue that, in doing it, the beneficiaries of change become crucial change agents in ongoing processes of institutionalization.