This article questions the use of morality frames and gender stereotypes in discoursing about abortion. The morality policy literature puts abortion forward as the paradigmatic example of its object of investigation. Yet, as heated as abortion debates can get, the issue is not always manifest in the spotlight. We argue salience of the issue depends on active politicization through morality frames. This contribution aims to further the understanding of policy (de)moralization by starting from a gap in the morality policy literature. Morality itself, although fundamental, remains under-theorized in the morality policy literature and is hardly ever operationalized using evidence-based theory. Instead, the positivist school in the morality policy literature assumes morality policy derives its qualification from referring to substantive first-principles, that is, to innate characteristics of a policy. Although the constructivist school holds morality policy is better understood as morality frames, they tacitly build on the definition provided by the positivists. This definition erroneously assumes that morality remains stable for different issues across cultures and over time. We take up a structuralist constructivist approach that shifts focus from the content of morality policy onto the form in which it appears. Abolishing the binary distinction between morality and non-morality renders each political issue, theoretically, a latent morality policy. We demonstrate our proposed approach benefits both the literature on framing and on morality policy by investigating a key abortion debate. Our results suggest (conservative) opponents use immorality frames, whereas (progressive) advocates deploy morality frames. We conclude by highlighting avenues for future research.

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This contribution provides a computer-assisted morality framing analysis of Vlaams Belang's 2019 manifesto. The VB is in the literature regarded as a prototypical example of the Populist Radical Right (PRR). We first concisely review what PRR politics is and what it consists of, tentatively distinguishing four elements which we hypothesize will materialize in corresponding subframes running throughout the manifesto. We point to a mismatch between the omnipresent role of morality in all PRR subframes and the little attention devoted to the concept in the PRR literature. We introduce a useful theory from social psychology into framing literature to create a novel methodological approach to frame analysis that builds a bridge between a qualitative content and a quantitative context approach. The results support our hypothesis that populism, nationalism, nativism, and authoritarianism can be distinguished from each other. Additionally, we detect a fifth PRR subframe, crimmigration, by its unique role of morality.