Advocacy Coalitions in East European Sex Tourism: The Case of Latvia

Abstract

The widening of the European Union and the emergence of budget airlines have brought with them a host of challenges to new member states like Latvia. A result of the economic polarization and its disproportionate effect on women is the explosion of sex tourism. East European destinations such as Riga have become more prevalent and accessible for sex tourists particularly from Western Europe. Despite this influx of sex tourists, the Latvian government has not formulated a policy response to manage sex tourism. Using Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) from the public policy literature, this project examines sex tourism related policies from the late communist period, starting in 1980 to the present and investigates how policy subsystems influence the shaping of policy in post-communist democracies. Process tracing and elite interviews uncovered two coalitions that formed around Latvian sex tourism, a feminist advocacy coalition and a business advocacy coalition. The data also revealed that these coalitions have remained intact despite the, at times, fluid membership of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) due to economic constraints. This paper also determined that there is no policy on sex tourism in Latvia despite the fact that many government representatives said that there were similar measures found in other policies such as prostitution, pornography, human trafficking, and adult entertainment thus, sex tourism was just a name for another type of similar activity. In addition to these findings, this project also demonstrates that ACF is applicable to mature but evolving policy subsystems outside of the United States and Western Europe. It also recognizes feminist organizations and the subtleties of actors involved in feminist policy research as key players in the policy subsystem that share beliefs and coordinate activity.