| The term morality policy refers to policies that are characterized by debate over core values that are typically grounded in religious belief. Examples of morality policies include abortion, gay rights, and prayer in school to name a few. Advocates of morality policies often invoke arguments describing a particular activity as sinful and want policymakers to validate their views over the views of others.;Scholars investigating the determinants of morality policy adoptions generally focus on factors related to the distribution of citizens' values, public opinion, issue salience, and political factors such as party affiliation of elected officials. In this dissertation, I argue that existing morality policy research has missed an important piece of the puzzle in explaining state-level morality policy adoptions and diffusion patterns.;I argue that the U.S. Supreme Court's frequent use of judicial review creates four different constitutional contexts. These contexts, determined by the Court's decisions, affect the policymaking environment in which state legislators consider the adoption of morality policies. This, in turn, affects the pattern of diffusion of morality policies across the states.;In my dissertation, I test hypotheses regarding the innovation and diffusion of post-Roe abortion policies in the American states from 1973--2000. Two main analyses are undertaken. The first is an analysis of the diffusion patterns of ten abortion policies across the states from 1973--2000. The second is a series of multivariate analyses that examines the base determinants of abortion policy adoption, the effect of the constitutional contexts, and the conditional effect of certain variables on abortion policy adoption in the different contexts. An event history model is utilized and data are estimated using the Weibull regression model. |
