The Politics of Rights Protection in Western Democracies

Abstract

This article examines two contentious rights debates – prisoner voting and gay marriage – in five Western democracies in order to assess the impact of different methods of rights protection. The five countries share similar political and legal histories, but two of them (the United States and Canada) have constitutional bills of rights, two (New Zealand and the United Kingdom) have legislative bills of rights, and one (Australia) has no national bill of rights. The article examines whether the existence of bills of rights has affected the outcome of debates on prisoner voting and gay marriage in the countries in question. The article concludes that, although, in general, the existence of a bill of rights has tended to correlate to the improved position of marginalised groups in these particular debates, that has not uniformly been the case. Moreover, even when bills of rights appear to have been relevant, their connection to the outcomes has not always been a linear one.