Is Moral Policy Different?

• In Event: Policy Learning through Networks and Diffusion

Abstract

The question of what drives policymakers to implement the policies that they do has been a puzzle that political scientists have been grappling with for decades. Through a challenge of Lowi’s (1964, 1972) theory that policy drives politics, Mooney and Lee (1995) demonstrate that even distinct policy areas—moral and economic—derive from political stimuli. In this paper, we strive to build on these theories to determine how policymakers at the state level approach the politics of policymaking. Do state legislators approach the policymaking process with morals or the economy as the main driver of policy adoption? Through an analysis of the massive State Policy Innovation and Diffusion (SPID) dataset, we answer this question. We also utilize different categorizations of moral policy to determine whether the changing nature of a policy area (for instance, when a policy area becomes considered to be moral in character) influences adoption patterns within that area.

Authors

• Srinivas Parinandi, University of Colorado at Boulder

• Tyler Garrett, University of Colorado Boulder