The puzzle of permissiveness: understanding policy processes concerning morality issues

Abstract

The growing interest in morality politics has spurred a large number of studies on individual morality issues and the gradual shift from restrictive to permissive regulation across Western Europe. Several studies have further pointed to the changing role of religion as the main cause of permissive policy shifts. However, seen in a comparative perspective across four countries and five morality issues, the move towards permissiveness poses more of a puzzle than a simple shift. Religion and secularization do not impact on regulation directly, but are filtered through a policy dynamic in which the essential factor is whether or not the party system contains a conflict line between secular and confessional parties. Countries without confessional parties, here the United Kingdom and Denmark, surprisingly end up less permissive than countries with strong confessional parties, here the Netherlands and Spain, because the former group lacks the conflict line necessary to politicize morality issues

Keywords:

• Agenda setting
• morality issues
• party conflict
• policy process
• religion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Danish Social Science Research Council for the project ‘Morality Politics in Comparative Perspective’ and the support from the other members of the research group (Erik Albæk, Frédéric Varone, Donley Studlar, Arco Timmermans, Gerard Breeman, Laura Chaqués Bonafont and Anna M. Palau Roqué).

Notes

Non-party, religious actors are not the main theoretical focus, but they will be included in the empirical analysis below. We expect their behaviour to be structured by the religious–secular conflict.

Our focus is on legislation at the national level, thus omitting court decisions, administrative decisions, and decisions at the subnational level.

See Engeli et al. (2012) for detailed documentation of the coding work. To give a better sense of the coding procedure, we present the indicators used for coding the policy decisions on ART. ART regulation contains two distinct dimensions (Bleiklie et al. 2004; Engeli 2010): the medical autonomy granted to physicians to practice ART; and the financial coverage for ART treatments. Each dimension was captured by a set of indicators. For medical autonomy, the seven indicators measured the autonomy granted to physicians to practice the three main ART techniques (artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, intracytoplasmic sperm injection) and the four main related techniques (donation, cryopreservation, pre-implantation diagnosis, surrogacy). The seven indicators were coded from 0 (ban) to 3 (full autonomy) and were then aggregated into an additive index. The second dimension, financial coverage, captured the extent of public financial coverage for ART treatments and the regulation of the treatments rate, also from 0 (no public coverage and regulated rate) to 3 (full coverage and fully regulated rate). The two additive indexes were finally aggregated into a composite index that gives the overall measurement of the degree of permissiveness of the decision.

In terms of coding, we treat access to ART treatment for others than heterosexual couples as part of the same-sex marriage issue as the discussion has mainly related to homosexual (lesbian) couples.