Abstract
Employing two theories of morality policy, Policy Types and the "Two Worlds" of religious/secular party systems, we describe and attempt to explain the empirical patterns for five morality policy issues (abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted reproductive technology/stem cell research, and same-sex marriage) across 24 Western democracies since World War II. What is the content of policy adoption? Are some countries consistently more permissive or restrictive on morality issues? How long do these issues stay on the political agenda? These issues have been on the agendas of all of the countries for varying time periods, with some being older in vintage (death penalty, abortion, euthanasia) than others (ART/stem cells and same-sex marriage). The general tendency has been toward greater permissiveness, but there still remains considerable policy diversity. While there has been substantial change on morality policies in Western democracies since World War II, the change is more thorough in some jurisdictions and in some regions more than others.
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Notes
In contrast, a popular US textbook on state and local government (Donovan et al. 2015) has three chapters on policy, one of which is morality policy, with the others being (1) social welfare and health and (2) education. Morality policy is the longest of the three.
From a European perspective, Heichel et al. (2013) argue that judicial involvement in policymaking is less democratic than other institutional forms.
In the Two Worlds model, one would expect a left/right split on content of morality policy, especially in religious party systems. While this hypothesis will not be tested here, the Roman Catholic Church changed its attitude toward the death penalty to support abolition after Vatican II in the early 1960s, although it never made this position as central to its political arguments as the other morality issues have been. Furthermore, there is a long tradition of members of left-wing parties being prominent advocates in debates on this issue (van Koppen et al. 2002; McGann and Sandholtz 2012) as well as on others.
There is a third perspective on morality policy, that it depends on framing of the issues, but this may vary across groups, individuals, and jurisdictions (Knill 2013). For applications of this approach in the USA, see Wald et al. (2001), Roh and Berry (2008), Mucciaroni (2011). Engeli et al. (2012a) use party manifestos to address framing in some European countries. Since we have no indicators of framing in our larger universe of countries, we cannot address this perspective.
As Baumgartner and Jones (1993) emphasize in punctuated equilibrium (PET) theory, multiple venues in the USA can provide opportunities as well as constraints for policy change, a two-edged sword. Thus, they are not "veto points," strictly speaking, in that all venues may not have to agree via explicit decision to each policy. On veto points, see Stepan and Linz (2011).
In effect, a cumulative total of institutions employed in morality policy constitutes an unweighted institutional index. No version of Policy Type theory weighs the importance of different institutions. In addition, since available institutions vary by country, weighing them would be difficult to do.
One reviewer contended that parties are not a venue, but an actor within an institutional framework. That is how the Two Worlds explanation treats parties, but the Policy Type explanation argues that party division is an institutional characteristic for morality issues. Thus, we offer a traditional hypothesis based on that model. See Smith (1975), Smith and Tatalovich (2003), and Tatalovich and Daynes (2011).
The death penalty has uniformly been abolished by all 18 West European democracies. In the broader realm of 24 Western democracies, an “intermediate” score is obtained in the USA, Israel, and Japan since it is used in highly restricted circumstances.
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 center-right parties. Italy can be considered to have at least two confessionally oriented parties (with former Christian Democratic members) similar to Spain. In the latter country, the Popular Party is highly religiously influenced through church-related organizations and positions taken on morality issues rather than explicit connections to the Catholic church (Chaqués Bonafont and Palau Roqué 2012). The recent attempt to restrict abortion laws is an example of this. On the other hand, France and Greece also have parties in the Centrist Democrat International, but they do not have such religious ties. Ireland also has one party (Fine Gael) in the Centrist Democrat International.
Since the data are not coded on policy actions by individual years, we cannot perform any type of time series or event history analysis. Thus, we cannot examine the effects of the 1970s regime changes from authoritarian to democratic in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. We also do not make fine distinctions on institutions across countries, for instance, between those where use of the referendum is restricted to constitutional issues (Denmark) and those where it is more widely permitted (Switzerland). These questions are left for others to examine, although we do address the stability of results for the three countries without a continuous post-1945 democratic history in endnote 12.
In examining the nature of the relationship between the variables and determining whether there is sufficient ground to state that an increase in one variable results in a consistent change in another, we conducted a bivariate linear regression analysis. A difference in means test was used to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between identified groups. In determining differences between two groups (European vs. non-European; European vs. USA; non-European vs. USA), a t test was used where an assumption of similar variances was made. Where there are three groups being compared together and against each other (European vs. non-European vs. USA), a simple ANOVA test was used. The nonparametric Mann–Whitney (rank sum) test was used to examine the relationship between the approaches to morality policy within the target countries. The Mann–Whitney U test 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). Thus, the results for the Mann–Whitney U test in Table 4 are very similar, although overall somewhat stronger, than conventional difference in means t tests of the same data (not shown). Since the overall mean and median are close in value, with the exception of total venues (expected, since some countries have more available venues than others), the distribution of scores is relatively symmetrical.
In this study, we do not consider the dates of legalization of homosexuality, which of course affects the same-sex domestic relations debate but in most cases this occurred decades, and some cases centuries, before the more specific debate about legalizing ongoing same-sex relationships.
Since three countries (Greece, Portugal, and Spain) have had interrupted democratic histories post-1945, we compared the results for these three countries with those of the other 21. There were no meaningful changes in the results from those of the original analysis for all 24 countries. The most significant difference occurred for the first hypothesis (more venues lead to less permissive regimes), which shifted from a slightly positive coefficient to a slightly negative one. A high p value, however, indicates that these results are not reliable. Contact the authors for a copy of this analysis.
Some commentators have questioned whether capital punishment has enough similarities with other morality issues. Thus, Tables 3, 4, 5 were recalculated excluding the death penalty. The results were very similar to those presented here, with four significant results for data in Table 3. Three were the same as previously, with significant results on duration for total venues, party divisions, and legislative initiatives. In the fourth, decentralization is significant on duration. In the recalculated Table 4, there were no significant differences between religious and secular party systems. With Italy as secular, the groups are not significantly different on anything. The recalculated Table 5 indicates that the USA is significantly different from other non-European countries on duration (0.05 level), with the USA earlier and longer, but there are no significant differences from European countries. While there are some differences, analysis of other individual issues would also find differences, and our overall conclusion is that the death penalty has more similarities than differences with other morality issues, despite its seemingly definitive resolution in more countries than the other policies. Contact the authors for a copy of this analysis. The issue of how each individual issue fares across these 24 countries is worthy of a separate paper, currently in preparation.
Two such possibilities are the refinement of the three-point ratings system to include finder gradations, as well as an index of the role of religion and party competition, especially one that would be sensitive to developments over time since all of the dependent variables except current policy are time-dependent.
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Studlar, D.T., Burns, G.J. Toward the permissive society? Morality policy agendas and policy directions in Western democracies. Policy Sci 48, 273–291 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9218-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9218-9