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Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisanpolitics i n general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different moralitypolicy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing anew encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that arehomosexuality, same-sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 Europeancountries over ve decades from 1960 to 2010.Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political partiesfor morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Startingfrom the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments tovarying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates thatparties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needsto be qualied in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions orpreferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, moralitypolicy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left-right and secular-religiousdimensions, but also the conicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green-alternative-libertarianand traditional-authoritarian-nationalist (GAL-TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, itis argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third,partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country-years, are used as the unit ofanalysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom overcollective interests (i.e.,left and liberal parties) are associated with signicantly more liberal morality policiesthan party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). Whilethe latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that theymight preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which maybe because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policyoutputs were already quite permissive.
