The Diffusion of Morality Policies: State-Level Comparative Analyses in the United States of America

Through event history analysis and seemingly unrelated estimations, this study investigates the way in which diffusion of state-level legislation in the USA changes according to the varying degrees of morality policy characteristics it displays. The author finds that the magnitude of diffusion increases when policies reflect fewer characteristics of morality policy. Moreover, policies with high moral content diffuse when preceded by a bounded-learning process, information about which is heavily drawn from polities with similar moral attributes; learning about legislation with moderate and minimal characteristics of morality policy not only occurs selectively, but information is also retrieved from ideologically dissimilar polities, too.