Although veto groups analysis tends to treat all institutions as being capable of having varying preferences, individual institutions, or configurations of them, may have stable preferences that can lead to policy change, as Lijphart indicates. This paper investigates whether different political institutions across 24 Western democracies (legislatures, party systems, decentralization, the judiciary, referendums, and constitutions) are likely to be a venue for debate across five morality policy issues (death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research/ART, and gay marriage), both in terms of the aggregate as well as individual issues. Using a data set from 1945 forward and comparing two common theories of morality policy change, policy types and religious/secular party systems, this paper will focus on the role of institutions rather than countries in policy change.
