Innovations Collected by Policy Type and Target

Abstract

To construct a list of morality, governance, and regulatory policy innovations, a simple coding procedure was used to classify innovations by policy type. Three graduate student coders familiar with the policy typologies literature were independently asked to identify three types of policies: (a) morality policies – a form of social regulatory policy in which the government practices “the exercise of legal authority to affirm, modify, or replace community values, moral practices, and norms of interpersonal conflict” (Tatalovich and Daynes 1998, xxx); (b) governance policies – a category of regulatory policy that “modifies the behavior of the public sector and government officials” by changing the rules of the political system to “regulate how the state should proceed to govern” (Tolbert 2002, 80); and (c) state regulatory policies , – economic, environmental, and professional regulatory policy innovations in which government uses its coercive authority to shape the behavior of private industry or citizens in order to achieve policy goals. Coders were given a fourth option for policies that did not match any of these criteria. Because policies are often overlapping (involving both regulatory and morality components), coders were instructed to classify policies by their dominant characteristics. Only policies with perfect intercoder agreement were included in the aggregated measure. This method identified 40 regulatory policies, 22 morality policies, and 10 governance policies. These policies are listed in pages that follow.