Is morality policy different? Institutional explanations for post-war Western Europe

Abstract

Although there has been increasing recognition that morality policy in Western democracies is a distinctive field of study, many analyses are relatively narrow in issues and jurisdictions. This contribution examines broad empirical patterns for five morality policy issues across 18 West European democracies since World War II. The issues analysed are abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted reproductive technology (ART, including stem cell research) and same-sex marriage. Which of two prominent institutional theories of morality policy, policy type and two worlds, help explain morality policy processes? The results indicate that morality policy processes do differ from the usual ones of parliamentary government, and that important differences are captured by the religious/secular division of party systems, depending on which countries are considered for each category.

Keywords:

• Institutions
• morality policy
• party government model
• policy type
• religious party system
• secular party system

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to William Harrison for research assistance. Earlier versions of this contribution were presented at the European Consortium of Political Research, Muenster, 2010, the Southwest Social Science Association, Las Vegas, 2011, and the International Political Science Association, Madrid, 2012.

Notes

Although Hooghe et al. (2010) have several policy indicators for different levels of government, morality policy is not among them. Most discussions of morality policy at the level of individual countries focus on the central level, although variations by decentralizated authorities are sometimes acknowledged (Engeli et al. 2012; Tremblay et al. 2011). For purposes of this paper, we consider Denmark to be a decentralized country because of the status of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, where exceptions to central Danish laws apply.

The Christian Democratic International became the Centrist Democrat International in 2001, thus confusing the formal distinction between Christian Democratic and other conservative parties. Similarly, the European People's Party in the European Parliament contains a broad array of centre-right parties. Italy and Ireland can be considered to have Christian Democratic parties in the same sense that the Conservatives in Spain are considered a highly religiously influenced party, through internal influence of church organizations and positions taken on morality issues rather than explicit connections between churches and parties. On the other hand, France and Greece also have parties in the Centrist Democrat International, but they do not have such religious ties.

The Mann–Whitney U typically provides comparable power to the standard two-sample t-test when the assumptions of the t-test are met, and is somewhat more robust when the assumptions are violated (e.g., normality). For an extended examination of the relative power of the two approaches, see Duval and Groeneveld (1987). While bootstrapped difference of mean (or median) scores could be provided in an attempt to increase robustness of the confidence intervals, the fact that the data is essentially a population, more than a random sample, the gain from using re-sampling methods on population data is not clear. Statistical inference on population data largely provides us with information on the strength of the relationship, since inference from a sample to a population is not at issue here.