Same-sex marriage

This thesis conducts a congruence analysis to test the strength of two dominant but competing theories within the public policy literature: the Advocacy Coalition Framework by Sabatier and the Discourse Coalition Framework by Hajer. There is a gap in the existing literature on the ability of the classical public policy theories to explain change in morality policies. The research aim of this thesis is therefore to discover whether it is the power of politics or the power of discourse that best explains variation in the degree of permissiveness across countries. As case studies, the policy processes that have led to the legalisation of same-sex marriage (SSM) in the Netherlands (2001) and Germany (2017) have therefore been examined comprehensively. Two hypotheses – formulated to assess the strength of the ACF and the DCF – have been tested on the Dutch and German case. The analysis of these hypotheses finds that whereas the ACF can explain the policy process in the Netherlands, the DCF can explain the policy process in Germany. The conclusion of this analysis is that neither the ACF nor the DCF accurately and consistently explains morality policy change with regards to SSM. The fact that both theories have been challenged by the opposite cases – even though these have been carefully selected in the theoretical framework and research design – tells us a great deal about the weakness of both of these classical theories to account for morality policies. The existing literature reveals that there is a wide variety of explanations that account for variation in the degree of permissiveness towards morality policies more generally and same-sex marriage specifically, the most dominant of which have been the role of religion, societal value conflicts, party cleavages, the role of the judiciary and international influences. Although the ACF and DCF address the party cleavages and societal value conflicts respectively, they – as well as the other classical public policy theories – fail to address other important factors that may lead to morality policy change. Therefore, the conclusion of this thesis is that morality policy change is significantly different from other fields of regulation, and should therefore be treated as such. Hence, there is a need in public policy research to either alter existing theories to account for a wider range of policy issues, or to create new theories or frameworks that explicitly account for morality policy change.