Does morality policy exist? Testing a basic assumption.(Report)

Introduction

After the 2004 presidential election, journalists, pundits, and pollsters claimed that moral values had become the main criterion on which voters assessed candidates. "Family and family values matter," opined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "they are not just relevant but dominant." (1) This hyperbole was quickly debunked by cooler heads in the social science community (Fiorina, 2005; Hillygus & Shields, 2005; Langer & Cohen, 2005; but see Mulligan, 2008), but in these reports, the popular press noticed a phenomenon that scholars had been exploring more systematically for over a decade, that beyond simple economic self-interest, basic moral values may have important and independent effects on political behavior (Carmines & Layman, 1997; Craig, Martinez, Kane, & Gainous, 2005; Layman, 2001; Weisberg, 2005).

In one branch of this literature, scholars have posed and tested a variety of hypotheses about how the politics of "morality policy" differ from the politics of run-of-the-mill, economically driven policies. Relative to other policies, morality policies are said to be adopted in greater congruence with public opinion (Camobreco & Barnello, 2008; Mooney & Lee, 2000) or not (Smith & Tatalovich, 2003), to have more ideological politics (Langer & Brace, 2005), to have noneconomic interest groups more powerful in their politics (Allen, 2005), to have their debates determined more by values than expertise (Lewis & Brooks, 2005), and to have their adoption influenced more by values than socioeconomic factors (Gibson, 2004; Mooney & Lee, 1995). In short, the politics of morality policy are said to differ from those of nonmorality policy in systematic, explainable ways.

One fundamental assumption upon which this line of scholarship is built is simply that this type of policy exists. That is, morality policy scholars assume that these policies have certain distinctive characteristics, namely that they generate conflicts of basic moral values, do not lend themselves to compromise, and are widely salient and technically simple (Mooney, 2001). (2) Indeed, any scholar evaluating Lowi's (1964) basic hypothesis that policy affects politics must assume that policies can be divided into distinct types based on theoretically relevant characteristics. While this assumption is often deceptively easy to make, it has been found to be quite problematic to support for some typologies (Anderson, 1997; Roberts & Dean, 1994; Tolbert, 2002).

We test this assumption of policy typology directly by asking: Does morality policy exist? Empirical support for hypotheses derived from the assumption of this typology provides indirect evidence of morality policy's existence. But heretofore the existence of morality policy has not been demonstrated directly. Indirect evidence of its existence may simply be spurious, attributable to some other factor that links those policies that have been deemed by scholars to be morality policies.

Using data from a telephone survey of just over seven hundred Illinoisans in 2005, we compare seven policies on four of morality policy's assumed characteristics, assessing whether they hang together in the pattern that scholars have suggested. We find that policies do indeed vary along most of these traits as morality policy scholars have assumed. In short, morality policy exists; there is a class of policies that have most of the bundle of characteristics claimed by morality policy scholars to distinguish them from other policies. Our analysis also suggests new avenues for research on this class of policies.

What Is Morality Policy?