The moral foundations of crime control in American presidential platforms, 1968–2016
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520966979 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Jasmine R Silver,Elizabeth K Brown |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The moral foundations
of crime control in
American presidential
platforms, 1968–2016
Elizabeth K Brown
Sociology Department, UMass Boston
Jasmine R Silver
School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University - Newyork
Abstract
The present research for the first time uses Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an
analytical framework for evaluating the moral foundations of prescriptive presidential
party platform statements on crime control from 1968 through 2016. We use summa-
tive content analysis to consider the politics of crime control at a broad, foundational
level. Our analysis brings data to bear on previously obser ved trends in the politics of
crime control (e.g., Democrats became increasingly conservative on crime in the
1990s) and deepens our understanding by illuminating and contextualizing the latent
ideologies and implicit moral orientations to crime of both parties over time. Our
findings speak to the prominence of certain moral foundations, authority and care in
particular, in partisan frameworks on crime control and indicate trends in reliance on
individualizing foundations (fairness and care) and binding foundations (authority,loyalty,
purity). We consider the implications of these findings for future research on the politics
of crime control.
Keywords
crime control, moral foundations, party platforms, politics, qualitative
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth K Brown, Sociology Department, UMass Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA 02125-
3393, USA.
Email: elizabeth.brown@umb.edu
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520966979
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2022, Vol. 24(2) 196–220
Introduction
A substantial body of punishment and society literature has considered the devel-
opment of crime and crime control as a political issue in the U.S. since the 1960s
(Clear and Frost, 2014; Murakawa, 2014; Tonry, 2009). This literature suggests
that the last sixty years have seen substantial shifts in the salience, use, and framing
of crime control as a political issue by the Democratic and Republican parties
(Beckett et al., 2016; Dagan and Teles, 2016). While politicization of crime at the
national level in the U.S. was led by the Democratic Party in the 1940s and 1950s
(Murakawa, 2014), the Republican Party pushed crime control to the center of
their platform with aggressive policies and rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s
(Beckett, 1997; Gottschalk, 2015). The 1990s saw a convergence between parties
in attention to crime and adoption of tough on crime rhetoric and policies (Clear
and Frost, 2014), and this “purpling” of crime as a political issue continued into
the twenty-first century with Republicans, and conservatives in general, seeking to
take the lead on “smart on crime” approaches and criminal justice reform initia-
tives (Beckett et al., 2016; Dagan and Teles, 2016; Page, 2012).
The extant literature on partisan dynamics and the politics of crime control has
tended to focus on specific policy issues such as mass incarceration (Beckett, 2018;
Dagan and Teles, 2016), state specific dynamics (Barker, 2009; Campbell, 2014;
Campbell et al., 2020; Miller, 2008), or broad narratives about “the punitive turn”
(Garland, 2001) and “governing through crime” (Gottschalk, 2006; Simon, 2007).
This latter body of research suggests that crime control has been a political vehicle
for instrumental and expressive messaging about fear, poverty, power, race, exclu-
sion, victimhood, deservingness, and ontological insecurity (Beckett and Western,
2001; Brown and Socia, 2017; Garland, 2001; Gottschalk, 2006, 2015; Scheingold,
1991; Simon, 2007; Wacquant, 2009; Wozniak, 2016).
While the broad contours of the development of the politics of crime control
have been well established, punishment and society research has not yet adequately
evaluated the moral foundations of partisan rhetoric and policy proposals on
crime control and the ideological positions those foundations suggest (Loader
and Sparks, 2016). In arguing for a need for research on the moral values under-
lying political dynamics in this area, Loader and Sparks (2016) recently suggested
the following: “...A fuller understanding of how social actors think, talk, write,
and act in relation to crime and its regulation requires paying careful attention to
the ideological positions from within which such activities take place... To eval-
uate crime control politically is ... to tease out the embedded values that are in
play when crime is constructed and acted upon and thereby to make clear what
(else) is at issue when the question of crime and what to do about it is being
debated” (Loader and Sparks, 2016: 320). We seek to shed light on those embed-
ded values.
While there are a number of potential frameworks to use in evaluating the
embedded values underlying partisan shifts on crime control, we have identified
Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt, 2012)—which is used in political science and
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Brown and Silver
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