Partisan effects in morality policy making

Abstract

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

Somewhere over the rainbow: Italy and the regulation of same-sex unions

“…The strand of research focusing on the role of political parties in morality policymaking has found that ideological colour affects policy change. While left and secular parties tend to support liberal values and promote SSU regulation (Budde et al 2017), conservative and confessional parties tend to oppose and block the country's path towards permissiveness in morality policy (Engeli, Green-Pedersen and Larsen 2013). Other studies have addressed the relevance of congruence in issue positions within the government coalition (Varone, Rothmayr and Montpetit 2006); this means that in the case of substantial disagreement between government actors, a process of nondecision or postponement is likely to occur.…”

(Same)‐sex in the city: Urbanisation and LGBTI rights expansion

“…In particular, social democratic and other centre-left parties in Europe traditionally have been more supportive of gender and LGBTI rights than the parties of the centre-right such as the Christian Democratic parties that seek to uphold more traditionalist values (Engeli et al 2012;Badgett 2009). While findings on this indicator are mixed (Siegel & Wang 2018;Budde et al 2018), we assume that countries where centre-left parties have been in government more often will be more likely to expand LGBTI rights.…”

Does partisanship explain spending patterns in congressional bill proposals?

“…On balance, however, in both the US and Europe evidence for partisanship as a driver of government spending or other policy outcomes is highly conditional (Baumgartner et al, 2009; Bevan and Greene, 2016; Budde et al, 2018; Froio et al, 2017; McAtee et al, 2003; McManus, 2019). Political parties are obviously important, so these results are surprising.…”