LEGISLATING MORALITY IN THE AMERICAN STATES - THE CASE OF PRE-ROE ABORTION REGULATION REFORM

Theory: Do policies that regulate morality and/or evoke strong moral reactions have significantly different patterns of adoption in the states than those policies whose impacts are primarily economic? We use social learning theory and demand, resource, and constraint analysis to explore this question. Hypothesis: Contrary to Lowi's thesis that policy determines politics, there should be many similarities in the politics of these very dissimilar types of policy. Methods: An evaluation of three dimensions of abortion regulation reform from 1966 to 1972 (diffusion, reinvention, and determination) is used to test this hypothesis. Event history, hazard rate, and correlation analyses are applied to aggregate state data. A Guttman scale of abortion regulation permissiveness is developed. Results: Our central conclusions are that even distinct policies (morality versus economically based policies) share similar politics, and the three dimensions of the adoption process can be influenced in different ways by the type of policy under consideration.