Suchergebnisse

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.

L'intensification des débats définis en termes de valeurs au sein de l'Union européenne ainsi que la montée en puissance des flux transatlantiques (c'est-à-dire des phénomènes de mimétisme et d'échange d'idées et de pratiques) amènent à considérer la morality politics de l'UE au regard du scénario américain des guerres culturelles. En particulier, la question de la mobilisation de la société civile européenne autour de l'avortement permet de tester les deux facettes du cadre théorique des culture wars :soit il existe une polarisation avérée et irréductible entre deux camps formés et fermés d'acteurs, soit il ne s'agit que d'un répertoire d'actions et d'un style politique particuliers visant à la dramatisation d'une cause en vue d'obtenir une reconnaissance politique et médiatique. Dans tous les cas, il s'agit d'étudier comment une morality issue ponctuelle devient le symbole d'un enjeu plus large :celui de la définition des valeurs, de l'identité et de la culture publiques. ; The intensification of the debates defined in terms of values inside the European Union as well as the growing relevance of the transatlantic flows (i.e. phenomena of mimesis and exchange of ideas and practices) are justifying the study of EU morality politics through the prism of the American scenario of culture wars. The mobilization of the European civil society around the abortion issue in particular enables us to test both facets of the theoretical framework of culture wars, i.e. either there is a patent and implacable polarization between two defined and closed groups of actors, or it only corresponds to a particular political communication style aiming at dramatizing an issue in order to get political and media attention. In both cases, the objective is to analyze how a punctual morality issue becomes the symbol of a broader stake: the definition of the public values, identity, and culture. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published