The Life Cycle of Moral Conflicts: Why Some Die, But Others Persist

There is a growing subfield in public policy analysis devoted to moral conflicts or what is commonly known as morality policy.¹ Moral conflicts engage contested values, are highly salient for ordinary people, and easily polarize the debate into nonnegotiable positions. Because religious beliefs often underlie these policy debates, moral conflicts have occurred more frequently in the United States than in the more secular countries of Europe,² though the presence of religious-based parties also accounts for the emergence of such conflicts there.³ Moral conflicts have been popularized as “culture wars” between mainstream and fundamentalist worldviews,⁴ and, as such, pose threats to consensus-building, political stability, and even public civility.⁵ If the emergence of moral conflicts is a worthy topic for scholarly inquiry, then surely the ability of our political system to end moral conflict without social trauma is equally important for policy analysis. This article focuses on why long-standing political debates over moral conflict sometimes fall off the policy agenda. In our search for explanations of why moral conflicts die, we draw on the agenda-setting literature in public policy and communications studies as well as sociological research on social movements and social problems.

Agenda-setting

Agenda-setting is the process by which a select number of social problems are elevated from the “systemic” agenda onto the “institutional” agenda, where a policy decision is made. Issues on the “systemic” agenda are defined by public opinion, interest groups, and social movements, whereas the “institutional” agenda involves legislative, executive, and judicial actors who make policy decisions. The “stages” model popularized by political scientist James Anderson gave only scant attention to how programs are terminated.⁶ Political scientist Barbara Nelson adapted the stages model to explain the growth in media coverage about “child abuse” through 1980, but she offered little speculation about its long-term prospects.⁷ A more contemporary “streams” model of policymaking by political scientist John Kingdon also neglected how policies are terminated,⁸ although his oversight was remedied by Iris Geva-May, another policy analyst, who argued that policy “termination occurs in opportunity windows, which open and close as political, policy, and problem streams converge.”⁹ But none of her examples involved morality policies.

A recent and more ambitious framework by policy analysts Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones borrows heavily from political scientists Anthony Downs and E. E. Schattschneider to focus on both the upside and downside dynamics of agenda-setting.¹⁰ Downs had postulated that an “issue-attention cycle” affects public opinion toward the environment, which evolved through five stages: (1) the pre-problem stage, (2) then alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm, followed by (3) a realization that the costs of significant progress would be very high, then (4) the gradual decline in the intensity of public interest, and a (5) post-problem stage.¹¹ An early study applied the Downsian logic to the issue of criminal victimization of the elderly, which within a decade reached the congressional agenda but as rapidly eroded from public concern when this social problem became redefined as a nonissue.¹²

A cognate body of sociological research argued that a “natural history” demarcated the evolution of social problems.¹³ Armand Mauss was one of the first sociologists to delineate the five stages of incipiency, coalescence, institutionalization, fragmentation, and demise, but the sociological perspective argued that social problems were “social constructions” insofar as this “life-cycle occurs independently of objective reality [italics in original] for the most part.”¹⁴ Others refined that developmental sequence, but generally none defined an end point in this natural history when a social problem was actually solved. Rather, demise was the result when the goals of the social movement were co-opted or repressed, or when new groups arose that contested the policy modus operandi.¹⁵ In contrast, policy analysts like Anthony Downs believed that social problems have a basis in reality (which is why the policy studies look for “triggering events” that dramatize their seriousness¹⁶).

The agenda-setting paradigm also influenced media studies, beginning with the classic study of the 1968...