This book is about a series of moral conflicts that emerged over the past century in North America and how those conflicts were resolved (or not) through politics and policy making. The authors Mildred A. Schwartz and Raymond Tatalovich cover quite a bit of territory. They compare the United States and Canada on seven issues—abortion, alcohol prohibition, capital punishment, gun control, marijuana, pornography, and same-sex relations—over long periods of times. The book is less about why the United States and Canada made different or similar policy choices than about why the “life histories” or trajectories of these conflicts vary across issues and national settings. After introducing the topic, the authors spend a chapter tracing conflict over the prohibition of alcoholic beverages through six “phases,” starting with its emergence and ending with its resolution, and they generate a host of hypotheses pertaining to the forces and actors that shape each phase. These hypotheses, along with others that pertain to the US–Canadian comparison, frame much of the analysis in the rest of the book’s chapters, each of which is a cross-case comparison focused on a single phase.
Much of the empirical data in the book come from already published histories and social science studies, but the authors also report primary data from trends in media coverage of the issues and from public opinion polls. They have brought together in one volume material that remains scattered in numerous studies that usually treat a single issue in a single country over a limited period. It is very challenging to do justice to such an ambitious investigation, but the authors efficiently employ the method of structured, focused comparison and make good use of historical and comparative approaches.
Substantively, this volume helps fill an important gap in policy studies. With a few exceptions (punctuated equilibrium), the public policy literature does not theorize much about the historical trajectories of policy issues. The authors deserve much credit for their efforts to build and test a large number of hypotheses. Some of their hypotheses could be more sharply drawn and specific, but most are clear and insightful. Some draw on the existing literature on agenda setting (especially Cobb, Ross, and Ross’s typology), and others break new ground. The authors have a solid grasp of the literature in policy theory and in each of the specific cases use it to good effect. Reflecting the fragmentation of the discipline, however, they omitted the extensive literature on historical institutionalism in political economy and comparative politics, which deals with similar historical process questions. Except for their exploration of a variable they call “prior legitimation,” they underplay the impacts of previous choices and conditions on future ones and treat each phase as fairly independent of the others.
The authors make their most critical contribution when they turn their focus to these two questions: Do moral conflicts get resolved? When and how does that happen? The resolution of policy conflicts, as they rightly point out, has been largely neglected. Here Schwartz and Tatalovich open a new field of inquiry in policy studies that is full of difficult but important questions. They could not have found a more intriguing case than the prohibition of alcohol to begin exploring these questions, because the issue was seemingly “resolved” with a constitutional amendment no less, only for it to be overturned a little more than a decade later by another amendment. The chapters that deal with the resolution of moral conflict do a very good job of analyzing how and why some moral conflicts are resolved and others persist. Among their most important findings is that Canadians have been able to resolve virtually all of the moral conflicts covered in the book, whereas Americans have resolved only a few of them. They persuasively argue that institutional differences between the two nations—such as different kinds of federal systems, party systems, executive powers, and judicial behavior—are crucial for understanding these outcomes.
However, this part of the book could have benefited from greater conceptual development and clarity, especially in the early chapters. First, it is not fully clear what criteria we should use to identify when an issue has (or has not) been “resolved.” I had trouble distinguishing the conditions or paths that lead to resolution (about which the authors have much to say) versus the criteria or indicators that we would use for adjudicating whether an issue had been resolved. At various times the authors point to different possible indicators—low issue salience (as indicated by media attention), public opinion consensus, the withering away of organized opposition, bipartisan agreement, and/or a policy decision that “symbolizes commitment to inclusive and fundamental values” (p. 193). Second, the authors treat “resolution” dichotomously. Yet, a wider array of outcomes could exist; for example, long-term resolutions, short-term resolutions, suspensions of conflict without resolution, and issues that remain actively contested. It is also confusing to speak of the “finality of resolution” (p. 186) when we really do not know for certain whether or when conflict will reemerge in the future. The evolution of society and politics is full of unexpected conflicts with surprising resolutions (e.g., same-sex marriage). Conflicts, as the authors show, can lead to multiple “resolutions” over time, as with alcohol prohibition. Our ability to declare issues resolved with any sense of finality requires post hoc analysis and a fair amount of historical distance. Nevertheless, we should applaud the authors for their contributions to theory building and hypothesis testing related to conflict resolution, as well as to the other phases that they cover.
Without diminishing the book’s significant contributions, I am not persuaded by the authors’ embrace of “morality policy” as a distinct type of policy. The authors define this group of issues as those that deal with “life and death, sex and reproduction and stigmatized individual behaviors” (p. 9). But all of these characteristics do not apply to all of their cases, so morality policy turns out to be a catchall category. For example, abortion and capital punishment deal with “life and death,” but the other issues do much less so, if at all. Conversely, many issues that we do not normally classify as morality policies deal with life and death, such as access to affordable health care, the consequences of climate change, and racial disparities in policing. One could make a similar argument about the political properties commonly identified as distinctive about morality policies. Such policies, the authors summarize, “provoke strong emotional reactions and those who hold to those values are unwilling to compromise,” are “non-economic” in nature, easy to understand (i.e., nontechnical), and salient (pp. 7–9).
Yet, many other policies that we do not normally associate with morality policies (again, climate change and health care reform) come to mind, but so do immigration and the COVID-19 pandemic. True, the latter issues usually have a major economic component, but so too does marijuana legalization, capital punishment (think of the costs to the state), and gun rights (think of gun manufacturing and sales). A basic standard for classifying phenomena is that the categories are mutually exclusive, but this seems hardly the case with “morality policies.” Second, the literature on morality policies has misled us into thinking that these issues are about moral judgments concerning behavior that is right or wrong. Because it is hard to think of a significant policy issue that does not involve some moral disagreement or choice, this criterion is not very helpful in distinguishing morality policies from those that do not fit the category. At the same time, whether and how much political advocates actually frame these issues in terms of moral codes and religious principles is a matter of empirical investigation, not something we should take for granted. Elsewhere (“Are Debates about Morality Policy Really about Morality? Framing Opposition to Gay and Lesbian Rights,” Policy Studies Journal 39 [2], 2011), I argued that morality policy should be understood as a broad strategy for framing issues and proposals, which may be contrasted with framing strategies that emphasize the consequences (benefits or harms) to society from an issue or policy or procedural aspects of policy making and implementation.
My reservations about the “morality policy” category do not take away from the strengths of the book or its important contributions to our understanding of how such policies emerge and evolve over time. Like many works with a broad scope of inquiry, this one raises as many questions as it answers, but that is not a shortcoming. This book should, and will in my opinion, spark a good deal of debate and research into the life cycles and trajectories of policy issues and into why and how they are (or are not) resolved.
