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Assumes that (1) the demand for sin is characterized by heterogeneous preferences, & (2) private behavior diverges from public statements. From these assumptions, a series of propositions about morality policy are derived. Rational politicians will perceive that demand for restrictive policies will be greater than it actually is & thus compete to produce more extreme policies. Bureaucracies will lack expertise & thus will not provide a check on political excesses. This "politics of sin" can be translated into a contemporary form of redistributive morality policy politics if the issue can be reframed by political actors to legitimate an opposition position. It is argued formally that sin policies in general will fail because they operate on subsets of the population that are more & more resistant to the policy instruments available to government. Potential expansions of this theory, including how it might be generalized to other types of public policy, are considered. 6 Figures, 25 References. Adapted from the source document.

1 Introduction -- 2 Morality policy as a party issue in a secular age -- 3 A new framework of attention on and change of morality issues in parliaments of the religious world -- 4 Comparing attention and change in morality issues -- 5 The rise and fall of morality policies in Austria, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands -- 6 Mechanisms of wedge issue competition -- 7 Explaining patterns of morality policy change in Austria, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands -- 8 The indirect effect of parliamentary attention on morality policy change through the stimulation of venue shifts and changing policy images -- 9 Morality politics in a secular age

AbstractThis study examines the religious-secular party cleavage in German morality politics from a new perspective by tracing politicization patterns at the individual level. It builds on the idea of issue competition and explores whether conflicts between Christian Democrats and secular parties align with the traditional denominational divide between Catholics and non-Catholics or with religiosity. By means of logistic regressions of Member of Parliaments' politicization behavior in the German Bundestag (1998–2002) with regard to three morality policies, the study provides evidence that German politics is still structured by a conflict between Catholics and non-Catholics, whereas the influence of religiosity is secondary. If party competition is at work, non-Catholics draw attention to morality policies, while Catholics refrain from doing so. This finding contradicts research pointing to a decreasing significance of Catholicism for Christian Democracy. Moreover, the study proposes an innovative way to re-examine party cleavages at the individual level and in between elections.

Objective. Scholars continue to debate whether morally charged political issues constitute a distinct type of policy question or produce essentially the same political dynamic as public controversies lacking an overt moral dimension. The debate will not be resolved until scholars test the determinants of putative morality policies with predictors drawn both from morality politics theory & from the socioeconomic factors that account for the distribution of many other public policies. This study reports such a test. Methods. We analyze data from our national survey of directors of school-based health centers. We use ordinary least squares regression models to predict the level of reproductive health care services provided to adolescents. Results. Service levels were influenced not only by cultural considerations, as morality politics theory would anticipate, but also by the same socioeconomic forces that account for policy levels in other domains. Conclusions. Policy for morality issues appears different from that for nonmorality issues but less distinctive than commonly imagined. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 40 References. Adapted from the source document.

Prostitution is a standard case of morality politics (MP), defined as a particular type of politics that engages issues closely related to religious and/or moral values, giving way to strong and uncompromising value conflicts in both societal and political spheres. This kind of issues have increasingly become a European policy matter due to their transnational nature and the tensions they create between different legal principles. Our hypothesis is that this leads to the emergence of a specific type of European morality politics (EMP) reflecting the particular constraints of the policymaking of the European Union (EU). The purpose of this article is to understand to which extent the rise of prostitution on the EU agenda alters usual patterns of MP to shape a distinctive type of EMP. Our findings suggest that prostitution characterizes EMP albeit with a significant difference, namely the challenge to regulatory inertia through the successful mobilisation of European values by some policy entrepreneurs to promote a neo-abolitionist approach. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Objective. Scholars continue to debate whether morally charged political issues constitute a distinct type of policy question or produce essentially the same political dynamic as public controversies lacking an overt moral dimension. The debate will not be resolved until scholars test the determinants of putative morality policies with predictors drawn both from morality politics theory and from the socioeconomic factors that account for the distribution of many other public policies. This study reports such a test. Methods. We analyze data from our national survey of directors of school‐based health centers. We use ordinary least squares regression models to predict the level of reproductive health care services provided to adolescents. Results. Service levels were influenced not only by cultural considerations, as morality politics theory would anticipate, but also by the same socioeconomic forces that account for policy levels in other domains. Conclusions. Policy for morality issues appears different from that for nonmorality issues but less distinctive than commonly imagined.

This paper explores the heuristic power as well as the limits of the American literature on religion and politics in the analysis of EU morality politics. Secular Europe is presently confronting some challenges raised by the increased politicization of morality issues. Morality issues feed value-based conflicts between actors holding diverging worldviews. Religious groups in particular seek to promote their own ethical interests on a variety of matters such as bioethics, environment, LGBT issues, etc. The American literature on religion and politics offers valuable insights into how to theorize the involvement of religious groups in morality politics. The religious restructuring theory, popularized under the "culture wars" label, explains how ideological differences crosscut denominational lines and create new religious alignments with political parties. The paper considers the possibility of transposing this American theory to the European Union; in other words: how and to what extent the American culture wars can provide a useful theoretical framework for studying EU morality politics? Taking into account the limits of such a transposition, the objective is to define how the culture wars scenario fits EU morality politics in the light of the social, institutional and political features of the Union. For this purpose, the culture wars theory is given two different – not necessarily antagonistic, rather possibly complementary – meanings: 1/ a political style emphasizing group differences in order to substantiate policy positions and to attract public attention; 2/ a polarizing force creating new and sustainable cleavages between and within social and political groups. This paper is arguing that EU morality politics corresponds more to a sensationalizing and absolutizing political style than to new deep and structural cleavages. In other words, religion does not produce a strong and structural polarizing effect as is the case in U.S. politics. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In contrast to the European tendency toward parliamentary enactment of euthanasia reforms, policies on physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in both Canada and the United States were promulgated by high court rulings. These rulings were very different, however: the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a constitutional right to assisted-suicide while the Supreme Court of the United States denied that any constitutional right exists. This comparative analysis of public opinion, media coverage, federalism, interest groups, and jurisprudence argues that the key variable explaining these divergent policy outcomes was the one-sided debate over PAS in the United States, while a two-sided debate occurred in Canada.

In practice, "states" almost never decide whether to legalize "gambling." Instead, each state decides what to do about each form of gambling, usually lotteries, casinos, or both. In an effort to shed light on the question of how the politics of gambling can vary not just from state to state but also from form to form, this article offers extended case studies of two adjacent southern states. Similar in many ways, not least their heavily conservative Protestant populations, Tennessee and Mississippi took overlapping but, in the end, different approaches to gambling. Tennessee considered legalizing casinos but chose instead to create a lottery. Mississippi considered creating a lottery but chose instead to legalize casinos. Adapted from the source document.