Debates over moral issues, over intractable questions of right and wrong, are difficult for political systems to manage. For scholars, the plethora of theoretical tools we can bring to bear to study such debates often only adds additional confusion. For Canadians, these difficulties are perhaps increased by our tendency to congratulate ourselves on our ability to manage moral issues when we (either implicitly or explicitly) compare ourselves to our southern neighbours. Mildred Schwartz and Raymond Tatalovich, pioneers both of systematic Canada–US comparison and of the study of moral issues, seek to resolve at least some of these challenges in The Rise and Fall of Moral Conflicts in the United States and Canada.
This volume compares the evolution of moral conflicts over Prohibition, abortion, capital punishment, gun control, marijuana, pornography, and same-sex relations in the two countries with a set of comparisons that draws on data from the early nineteenth century to the present. Its particular goal is to build a generalizable model of the life cycle of contestation over moral issues in politics and to use the contrast between the United States and Canada to identify the influence of a wide variety of contextual variables on the life cycle of such contestation. After a review of the literature on moral conflicts, the authors use Prohibition as a case study to develop a set of expectations about the life cycle of moral conflicts. These expectations are then tested against the other issue areas, in chapters organized by the author's categorization of the life cycle of moral contention—a categorization that differentiates between emergence, establishment, decline, resurgence and resolution.
The book explicitly seeks to bring together institutionally focussed work on agenda setting in public policy (for example, the work of John Kingdon) with that more rooted in work on the media and public opinion (for example, the work of Stuart Soroka) (15). In so doing, the authors seek to cast light on the difference between intractable moral issues and more readily compromised “normal issues.” Moral issues are defined as involving “contested values that provoke strong emotional reactions … [held by actors] unwilling to compromise…. [and that are] distinctly non-economic in nature” (8–9). Moral debates are salient to participants and do not require much expertise to choose on which side they belong (7).
Scholars working in either agenda-setting tradition will find The Rise and Fall of Moral Conflicts in the United States and Canada compelling in both the historical sweep of its empirical coverage and the depth of theoretical literature that it engages with. Scholars of American or Canadian political development can turn to it as a methodologically robust exemplar of work tracing political development in both countries. That it covers so much history so concisely is impressive.
Those working from other theoretical traditions will likely find themselves saying “and, yet …” at points in the analysis. Social movement and political party scholars, for example, will likely ask why questions of identity construction or resource mobilization are largely absent from the analysis. Scholars of a critical bent will find relatively little attention to marginalization, in general, or to race, in particular in the book (although there is significant attention to gender and religion throughout it). Most importantly, the theoretical line between moral and normal issues is left unclear. And there are substantive implications to these theoretical points. Most importantly, why contention over same-sex relations is an example of moral politics but contention over civil rights, Indigenous rights or environmental mobilization (for example) is not is left unclarified at the end of the book. Schwartz and Tatalovich deliver useful tools that could be deployed in examining the second group of issues but—insofar as the line between the two groups of issues is vague—have left unclear how further work ought to use those tools.
