No abstract

Over recent decades, factors such as religion and, specifically, Catholicism have emerged as key variables in the explanation of policy outputs and dynamics with regard to so-called morality issues. However, the standard theoretical arguments do not capture the whole story, as a comparison of same-sex partnership policies in Italy and Ireland shows. Based on existing approaches, we would not have expected that the more religious Ireland would move faster than Italy in adopting an act recognizing homosexual couples in social, tax and inheritance law. A closer examination of the policy process in the two countries reveals that the success and duration of decision-making in morality policies is affected by the institutional opportunity structures of the political system. They define the scope conditions for the Catholic Church to act as veto power and determine the government's policy style for resolving value conflicts.

Scholars of morality policy change primarily analyse state regulation. Through this narrow focus, they ignore private actors and their varying engagement across time and policies. We contribute to this research gap by comparing and explaining private actors’ involvement in euthanasia and prostitution policy in Germany. We argue that the extent of private engagement is determined by the private actors’ capacity to govern, governmental decision-making barriers and private actors’ interests. Thus, the present study makes an empirical contribution to the literature on private governance by exploring largely disregarded policy issues that are least-likely cases for the delegation of public regulatory competence. Furthermore, it adds to the morality policy literature in a theoretical way by showing that policy change in this field is not only a question of scope, timing and direction but also one of the types of governing actors.

This contribution adds to the scholarship on morality politics. It addresses the conditions of morality policy change by comparing the decisionmaking dynamics in the regulation of prostitution and same-sex partnerships in Italy and Spain over two decades. We seek to explain why and under what circumstances some political actors are successful in reforming morality policies. For this purpose, we develop a four-fold typology of morality policy change. Our findings highlight that the different regulatory dynamics in both Catholic nation-states depend on the balance of power among the change and blocking coalitions and their degree of congruence. We show that governments succeed in realizing their morality policy goals only if they are able to form a coalition with the relevant political and societal actors. Furthermore, the Catholic Church, not least owing to its historical ties with both nation-states (Italy and Spain), plays a particular but context-specific role.

The question of whether or not religion accounts for variance in the governance of moral issues, between and within countries over time, has long been debated but never conclusively answered. A novel data set encompassing innovative measurements of state regulation of "life-and-death" issues and of the religious stratification of society enables us to answer why previous studies reached contradictory results. The time-series cross-sectional analysis of 26 countries over 50 years reveals that dominant religious denominations in society indeed influence state governance approaches regarding the issues of abortion and euthanasia. This denominational effect is shown to be contingent on the religiosity of a country's population, but independent from the formal state-church relationship. Lastly, it is shown that the religious effect has an inverse U-shaped relationship with time, exposing the timeframe of analysis as decisive for inferences drawn in the study of morality policy.