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How do we understand alcohol and how do these understandings shape its regulation? ‘Rational’ explanations of this relationship depict public attitudes and regulation as simple products of a straightforward comprehension of the objective social and individual harms which alcohol is causing. This chapter uses historical and comparative evidence to show that the variability of ‘drink problems’ across cultures and historical periods cannot be explained purely in reference to levels of consumption and harm. Instead, drawing on the concept of moral regulation, it is argued that empirical concentration on the problematisation of alcohol and attempts to regulate drinking will yield more satisfactory explanations.

This chapter describes the evolution of the Nîmes Protestant movement from the first meeting of the church’s governing body, the consistory, to the outbreak of civil war the following year. In this period the movement converted key segments of the elite, including members of the présidial, and created its institutional structures. Protestants had become particularly prominent in Nîmes’s most influential factions, and in general had higher betweenness than Catholics. The consistory focused on morals legislation, promoted charity, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to restrain iconoclasm. By the end of 1561 Nîmes’s churches were in Protestant hands.

This chapter argues that the Third Way's adoption of self-actualisation and self-responsibility as its model of moral regulation meant that it greatly underestimated the importance of emotional, aesthetic, symbolic, and ritual elements in the creation of the social order, and above all it discounted collective influences on social relations. By buying into the notion that ‘reflexive individualisation’ was a wholly new, post-traditional feature of late modern culture, it mistook a culturally produced dominant myth for a new liberation, in which individuals met as ‘real’, ‘reflexive’, and ‘authentic’.

In this chapter the focus is the emotions of disgust and contempt that are discernible in newspaper accounts of the mothers, families and communities of children who die from extreme abuse or neglect. Drawing on critical moral panic theory, the chapter argues that media coverage reflects wider social and cultural anxieties about certain groups who are otherwise hidden from view; particularly the so-called ‘underclass’ and those categorised as Other. The chapter outlines the link between social work and attitudes to people living in poverty. The chapter shows how hostile coverage of social workers as bureaucratic folk-devils reflected contempt for their apparent lack of empathy for the child’s suffering. Social workers were portrayed as lacking a natural, common sense instinct to rescue children. But coverage also reflected deep anxiety about social work’s failure to engage punitively with mothers who stood out as shameless, not only because of what they had done, but because of who they were as moral subjects. Moral regulation by social work as constructed in the newspaper accounts involved surveillance necessitating close proximity to families who invoke disgust. Crucially, this proximity entails forceful interventions in the private space of the family home.

This chapter outlines the key arguments made in the book, setting them within the context of the historiography on borderlands, vice, moral regulation, and the postwar period. The chapter also outlines the methodological approach taken within the book, which includes blending social and cultural history.

In response to the visibility of vice, communities groups, activists, city residents, and government officials came together to fight what they saw as immoral industries destroying their cities. Their efforts produced a complex process of moral regulation in which they sought to define the parameters of proper conduct and to provide solutions to illicit industries in the border cities. This took place through the deployment of three main themes, including urban renewal programs as distinctly anti-vice projects; a fear of transients; and juvenile delinquency. On both sides of the border these themes were formulated through particular class and racial perspectives, which tended to frame urban issues in terms of decay and decline while simultaneously promoting the growth of suburban living, middle-class consumption patterns, good health, and social order. In doing so, anti-vice activism worked to define productive citizenship and community belonging in the border cities.

This chapter summarises the main findings of the book. It divides the development of alcohol regulation in England and Wales into four distinct historical phases and explores the connections of past to present within this long-term development. It also presents some conceptual reflections relating to moral regulation, moral panics and ‘moral inheritance’.

This chapter stretches from the 1920s to the 1960s, during which time the public profile of the ‘drink problem’ was relatively low and traditional constraints on lifestyle and pleasure began to be challenged. As evangelicalism declined and welfarist forms of government expanded, public alarm about drinking lessened somewhat and beer consumption even became seen aspartly positive during World War Two. So was this an age of permissiveness? This chapter explains that, despite these changes shifts in the contours of the ‘drink problem’, phenomena such as youth drinking and drink-driving were heavily censured in law and public discourse. So, efforts to morally regulate drinking were not abandoned during this period but revised.

Chapter Four continues the examination of the impact of temperance groups and ideas with an investigation of the period 1914-1921. It considers World War One, during which a host of new restrictions on drink sales were pioneered and various authorities urged citizens, for the good of the nation, to abstain from alcohol. It also analyses the post-war drink settlement in which some wartime restrictions were scrapped but others were retained. Ultimately, it highlights the widespread acceptance in this period of the idea that alcohol was essentially problematic, that teetotalism was largely positive and that both legal restrictions and moral compulsion should be used to govern drinking. The attitudinal and regulatory responses to both war and peace were thus, to an extent, shaped by the temperance movement.

Chapter Seven addresses alcohol and health. After outlining longer-term developments, particular attention is paid to the issues of public health and addiction in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The emergence of an influential public health perspective on drink problems, with associated regulatory agendas such as units guidance and pricing controls, is analysed. The links between contemporary public attitudes and proposed reforms and their Victorian antecedents are explored and used to help illuminate the continuing role of medical and public health perspectives in advancing the moral regulation of alcohol. Ultimately, it is argued that these ways of thinking about alcohol reproduce a historical fusion of health and morality.

This chapter argues that the Third Way's policy goals can be reconciled if a radical new approach is applied to the organisation of services, both commercial and public. Services now supply around 70 per cent of employment in advanced economies, and they comprise every aspect of economic activity, from the highly rewarded financial services to domestic and personal services such as hairdressing, social care, and cleaning, which are among the lowest-paid occupations. The crucial question is whether moral regulation through cultures of social value, nurturing and shaping the ‘social brains’ of participants, can replace the discredited contractual regulation of Third Way policies on a range of issues in public health, community education, and the physical environment. The discussion argues that the crash has already provided evidence that, given a more favourable organisational context and some additional resources, it can.

This chapter examines the advent of the temperance movement in England and Wales in the late 1820s and its turn to teetotalism in the 1830s. It considers, firstly, the movement’s relationship with earlier instances of public alarm about alcohol, such as the Georgian ‘gin panics’, before, secondly, considering its connections to contextual historical factors such as the spread of evangelicalism and the Beer Act 1830. It is argued that the teetotal temperance movement was distinct, in a number of significant ways, from earlier expressions of public anxiety about alcohol. This was a new project to morally regulate the use of alcohol and hence its emergence, in the 1830s, marks a turning point in how alcohol is understood in this country.

This chapter conceptualizes four different styles of moral regulation and outlines the way that these styles are measured throughout the book. It argues that styles of moral regulation emerge through the interplay of the rules that states uphold for morally contested behaviour and the sanctions they impose if those rules are violated. Depending on a state’s configuration on those two dimensions, it pursues a style of authority (restrictive rules/severe sanctions), lenient authority (restrictive rules/lenient sanctions), permissiveness (lenient rules/lenient sanctions) or punitive permissiveness (lenient rules/severe sanctions). Based on those conceptual considerations, the chapter presents the measurement approach, which is applied to a dataset on a particular type of public policies, i.e. morality policies, in nineteen European countries (1960–2010), put together within the scope of the MORAPOL project. Finally, it outlines the methodological approach and general research design pursued by the individual empirical chapters to explain puzzling patterns of policy change.

The introductory chapter defines central features of morality policies and summarizes the state of the art of morality policy research. Based on this assessment, the two leading research questions guiding the subsequent analysis are identified. The first is a descriptive question about how morality policies have been changing in recent decades. This chapter describes how this question falls into comparative and conceptual contributions. For the comparison, the areas under review are listed, including manifest morality policies and latent morality policies. For the conceptualization, the chapter summarizes the description of the styles of regulatory policy. The second research question is about how to explain changes in the styles of regulatory policy. The chapter goes on to discuss the book’s relationship to the existing literature and whether morality policy constitutes a valid policy type.

This chapter summarizes general features of the book’s overall approach to study morality policies from a cross-national and cross-temporal perspective. Building on a new dataset compiled within the MORAPOL project, the chapter focuses on empirical patterns in eight different policy areas and nineteen European countries, over a time period of fifty years (1960–2010). In a second step, the basic empirical and theoretical findings are presented. We begin with a discussion of central mechanisms triggering changes of the status quo of moral regulation. In a second step, we concentrate on the factors that affect the direction of change, that is, the moves towards different styles of moral regulation. The final part discusses the general implication of the book for the study of public policy in general. While a first central implication refers to the measurement of policy change in general, a second issue touches upon the explanatory scope that should guide policy analysis.

This chapter analyses the changing styles of abortion policy in nineteen European countries between 1960 and 2010. First, it empirically identifies a long-term cross-national development towards permissiveness in the morality policy, which is characterized by less restrictive rules for pregnant women and decreasing sanctions for rule violations. However, a closer examination reveals that these movements were often the result of multiple reform steps, undertaken separately on the rules and sanctions dimension. By compensating policy changes on one dimension with temporal policy stability on the other, states have managed to reform an area of public policy that is commonly considered immune to compromise. Policy developments in Great Britain (the Abortion Act 1967), which serves as a typical case in the context of our theoretical framework, and Switzerland, which deviates from our expectations, are analysed to extract explanatory factors for changing styles of moral regulation regarding termination of pregnancy.