How morality politics determine morality policy output – partisan effects on morality policy change

Results on whether party ideology influences the regulation of morally sensitive issues remain inconclusive. This is partly due to insufficient theoretical specifications of the link between party ideology and morality policy output that do not consider that different directions of policy reform give rise to distinct politics, although this insight has ranked prominently within the literature on comparative political economy as the ‘New Politics’ that characterize welfare state retrenchment. By integrating this insight into the ‘Two Worlds’ framework of morality politics, this paper achieves two things: First, it explains macro-level patterns of partisan impacts on the occurrence of permissive and restrictive reforms across six morality policy areas (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, pornography, and prostitution) in 16 West European countries between 1960 and 2010. Second, it accounts for the micro-level political dynamics that characterize restrictive reforms adopted by Christian Democratic governments, which are dominated by blame-avoidance.