How morality politics determine morality policy output – partisan effects on morality policy change

ABSTRACT

Results on whether party ideology influences the regulation of morally sensitive issues remain inconclusive. This is partly due to insufficient theoretical specifications of the link between party ideology and morality policy output that do not consider that different directions of policy reform give rise to distinct politics, although this insight has ranked prominently within the literature on comparative political economy as the ‘New Politics’ that characterize welfare state retrenchment. By integrating this insight into the ‘Two Worlds’ framework of morality politics, this paper achieves two things: First, it explains macro-level patterns of partisan impacts on the occurrence of permissive and restrictive reforms across six morality policy areas (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, pornography, and prostitution) in 16 West European countries between 1960 and 2010. Second, it accounts for the micro-level political dynamics that characterize restrictive reforms adopted by Christian Democratic governments, which are dominated by blame-avoidance.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality policy
• morality politics
• new politics
• religious world
• secular world

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) in the form of an ERC Advanced Grant (no. 249388). We thank all collaborators as well as the very constructive referees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christoph Knill http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8562-2102

Notes

1 We exclude two further restrictive reforms in Portugal in 1962 and in Spain in 1970 as we focus on democratic policy-making and exclude times of autocratic regimes.

2 A more detailed version of this case study can be found in the online appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) in the form of an ERC Advanced Grant (grant number 249388).

Notes on contributors

Christian Adam

Christian Adam is Assistant Professor at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the LMU Munich.

Christoph Knill

Christoph Knill is Professor at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the LMU Munich.

Emma T. Budde

Emma T. Budde is Consultant at Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Mali.