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 r eactions have significantly different patterns of adoption in the stat es than those policies whose impacts are primarily economic? We use so cial learning theory and demand, resource, and constraint analysis to explore this question. Hypothesis: Contrary to Lowi's thesis that poli cy determines politics, there should be many similarities in the polit ics of these very dissimilar types of policy. Methods: An evaluation o f three dimensions of abortion regulation reform from 1966 to 1972 (di ffusion, reinvention, and determination) is used to test this hypothes is. Event history, hazard rate, and correlation analyses are applied t o aggregate state data. A Guttman scale of abortion regulation permiss iveness is developed. Results: Our central conclusions are that even d istinct policies (morality versus economically based policies) share s imilar politics, and the three dimensions of the adoption process can be influenced in different ways by the type of policy under considerat ion.