Without enemies, without friends. Morality policies, the Roman Catholic Church, and Ireland’s ‘secular’ party system

Abstract

This is the accepted manuscript (post-print version) of the article.Contentwise, the post-print version is identical to the final published version, but there may be differences in typography and layout.

Understanding the Conflict of Conflicts: Is Left-Right Conflict a Necessary Condition for the Development of New Politics?

“…The reason for not including immigration is that it is a least-likely case of issue-emergence even before the absence of a strong left-right divide is taken into account: the absence of a radical right-wing party and a history of low immigration and net emigration, even in recent decades, make it less surprising that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have not expanded significantly the attention they devote to immigration (see O’Malley, 2008, for more). Among personal rights issues, we focus on abortion because it has been the site of successive crises in recent decades, and as such it is a more likely case of issue expansion than divorce, contraception, marriage equality or other issues (Galligan, 1998; Green-Pedersen and Little, 2021b).…”

“…However, these two opposing positions may also be integrated into the left-right conflict, as in Spain, for example (Bonafont and Roque, 2012). In Ireland, with neither a strong religious-secular nor a left-right conflict line to which such a conflict could be attached, the political conflict over abortion – ending with a referendum in 2018 that put abortion rights in line with rules typical of other European countries – has largely been a non-partisan affair, partly due to the use of referendums, and has cut across party support bases (Green-Pedersen and Little, 2021b; McGraw, 2018). Without any clear conflict structure, abortion and moral issues more generally have not offered any durable vote-seeking or coalition-building incentives for the two major parties to pay attention to the issue and thus party attention to these questions has been very scant (see Green-Pedersen and Little, 2021b, for details).…”

¿Discursos de moralidad o de racionalidad? La Iglesia Católica argentina frente a la despenalización del consumo de drogas (2009-2019)

“…Los estudios producidos por esta corriente se han concentrado mayormente en demostrar asociaciones entre, por un lado, factores religiosos o variables político-institucionales vinculadas al régimen de gobierno o al sistema de partidos y, por el otro, los resultados normativos que se observan en cuestiones morales a lo largo de distintos casos nacionales (Engeli et al, 2012;Budde et al, 2017;Green-Pedersen y Little, 2020). A los efectos de este trabajo, una desventaja fundamental de este prisma es que restringe la pertinencia política de la moral a ciertos asuntos definidos de antemano.…”