MORAPOL · Change in Policy Fields: The Impact of International and Domestic Factors on Morality Policies in 25 OECD Countries Between 1980 and 2010

MORAPOL pursues two basic objectives that entail both empirically and theoretically fundamental advances of the state-of-the-art. First, MORAPOL takes an innovative empirical focus. It is the first to provide systematic empirical knowledge on the development of morality policies. This policy area is so far unexplored from a policy-analytical perspective. The focus is on changing patterns of morality policy over time, across countries and policy subfields. The project compares morality policies in 25 OECD countries over a period of fifty years. It involves a comparison across nine different subfields of morality policy. Second, the project is conceptually innovative. The theoretical aim is to develop explanations and identify patterns of changes in policy fields rather than for individual policies or policy items. This holistic approach constitutes a path-breaking departure from existing concepts. This way, it is for the first time possible to develop theories that account for changes in whole policy fields or subfields. To systematically assess the influence of international and domestic factors on morality policy change, MORAPOL adopts a mixed-methods approach. In a first step, a macro-quantitative analysis is undertaken, based on legislative output data for the subfields and countries under study. This analysis is in a second step complemented with qualitative case studies. The case studies are selected on the basis of the results of the quantitative study, which turn out to be critical cases; i.e. cases that are apparently incorrectly predicted by the theoretical model.