The Political Economy of Attrition: LGBTI+ Activism, Collective Exhaustion, and the Stalemate of Public Policy in the Dominican Republic

The stalemate of LGBTI+ public policy in the Dominican Republic is commonly discussed through religious conservatism, institutional exclusion, and limitations attributed to civil society. This article develops a complementary explanation centered on activist exhaustion. Its central contribution is the political economy of attrition, a conceptual framework that identifies plausible mechanisms through which an institutional configuration-the interaction of state action and inaction with the architecture of international cooperation-may produce and unevenly distribute the burdens of sustained activism, erode mobilizing capacity, and thereby contribute to policy stagnation. Drawing on a critical review that integrates social movement theory, activist-burnout research, community resilience, emotional taxation, and sexual-citizenship scholarship, the article brings these literatures into dialogue with intersectional, travesti, and decolonial thought. It proposes that attrition may be distributed differently across social and organizational positions shaped by gender, race, class, and access to resources. The Dominican case illustrates and motivates the framework rather than empirically proving its causal relationships. The article closes with testable propositions, a research agenda, and policy implications.