From ‘morality’ policy to ‘normal’ policy: framing of drug consumption and gambling in Germany and the Netherlands and their regulatory consequences

Abstract

Drug consumption and gambling are regarded as morality policies, especially in the American literature. Both are perceived as sinful and treated accordingly. This highly generalized assessment is rarely analysed systematically in a non-American context. Therefore, we investigate whether these policies are indeed framed morally and if this framing is stable over time in two European countries. Next, we analyse whether shifts in morality framing have consequences for regulation. In this way,we contribute to the literature on morality policies, particularly the ways in which these policies are defined and empirically identified. We identify morality policies based on how actors frame issues rather than by policies' substantive content. We show that the morality framing was once prominent but has lost its importance over time, and we find a close connection between frame shifts and policy output, although this is not a uniform development and does not characterize all cases.

Keywords:

• Drugs
• framing
• gambling
• morality policy
• regulation
• value change

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank our three anonymous referees for their constructive comments. This contribution is based on the project MORAPOL (ERC Advanced Grant). We gratefully acknowledge the generous funding by the European Research Council.

Notes

Until 1990, West Germany only.

Please see the website http://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/knill/working-papers-downloads/ for a comprehensive overview.

We expected to find arguments emphasizing the fundamental right of individuals to decide on their own whether to gamble or to consume drugs. However, such arguments did not appear in the documents.

‘Kamerstukken’: Dutch parliamentary documents, available from http://www.overheid.nl/ and http://www.statengeneraaldigitaal.nl/.

‘Bundestagsdrucksachen’ (BT-Drs.): Documents of the German Bundestag; ‘Bundesratsdrucksachen’ (BR-Drs.): Documents of the German Bundesrat; both kinds of documents are available from http://www.dip.bundestag.de (1976 onwards).

We focus on national legislation; legislation of the Bundesländer was not analysed.

‘Reichstag’ refers to the German parliament and its documents between 1918 and 1933, available at http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de

See Note 5, above.

In light of European law, Germany tried to defend its state monopoly from the 2000s onwards by arguing that only nation states are able to control illegal gambling. This is one reason why the economic frame diminished in favour of the health and social frame.

We do not expect contradictory framing and regulation in the German Länder owing to vertical and horizontal linkages.

Dutch drug policy constitutes an extraordinary case; one might argue that the empirical finding was expectable in advance. However, the picture is much more complex because (1) the permissive regulations primarily refer to soft and not to hard drugs, and (2) the particular approach was not established before the mid-1970s.