The moral foundations of crime control in American presidential platforms,1968

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 summative content analysis to consider the politics of crime control at a broad, foundational level. Our analysis brings data to bear on previously observed 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

Introduction

A substantial body of punishment and society literature has considered the development 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 initiatives (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, exclusion, 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 underlying 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 evaluate 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 embedded 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 psychology research to map the moral content of political messages (Miles, 2016; Neiman et al., 2016)—as particularly appropriate. Briefly, MFT argues that there exists a set of foundational domains of moral concern and that the relative importance assigned to each of these “moral foundations” varies systematically across cultures and subcultures, including among conservatives and liberals in the United States (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt, 2012). In this research, we coded the moral foundations invoked in presidential platforms on crime and crime control from 1968 through 2016. By focusing on the moral foundations suggested by MFT, we allow the ideological positions of the two parties to vary freely, reflecting both moral foundations traditionally emphasized by liberal ideology (care and fairness) and moral foundations emphasized by conservative ideology (authority, loyalty, and purity). Thus, we do not constrain either party to a particular ideological framework.¹ Indeed, our goal is to illuminate the latent ideologies that are evident from moral foundations invoked by the parties. We do so by examining the prominence of and shifts in invocations to moral foundations that MFT suggests are underlying indicators of conservative and liberal ideology.²

This research provides a unique lens on the political dynamics of crime control in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We deepen understanding of the politics of crime control by considering the underlying orientations of the parties on crime—and more specifically, on the patterns of moral foundations invoked or expressed in each party’s prescriptive statements about policy. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief history of partisan politics related to crime control in the twentieth and twenty-first century. We provide an argument for the importance of party platforms in understanding the moral foundations of crime control and consider the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an analytical framework. We then present our research approach and findings.

A brief history of the partisan politics of crime control in the twentieth and early twenty-first century

“Law and order” politics in the U.S. has had a “strange career” marked by the framing and reframing of crime control objectives and targets by both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives (Gottshalk, 2015: 143). While Herbert Hoover had in 1928 focused on law enforcement priorities in his presidential campaign against Alfred E. Smith, crime control was largely absent from presidential party platforms during the first half of the twentieth century (Marion, 1995: 34). The modern introduction of crime control in American political rhetoric can be traced back to the 1940s, as President Truman and the Democratic Party sought to address violence against African Americans in the years following WWII (Murakawa, 2014). In the relatively low crime rate decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the Democratic Party took the lead in framing crime control according to racial justice and civil rights objectives.

As crime rates began to rise in the 1960s, Republicans used crime control as a partisan wedge to attract white southern Democrats to the Republican Party (Beckett, 1997; Weaver, 2007). As court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pushed forward anti-segregation and anti-discrimination policies, crime control concerns were reframed from being central to the pursuit of racial justice to being central to the maintenance of the social order of segregated America (Murakawa, 2014; Tonry, 2004). By 1968, both parties focused on crime control issues in their national platforms. The so-called “Southern Strategy,” or political realignment of the late 1960s and 1970s, played on the fears and resentments of some white Americans toward the civil rights movement and set the stage for the Republican Party to push for increasingly punitive policies (Beckett, 1997; Cullen and Gendreau, 2001; Gottshalk, 2015). The rise of punitive policies was also bolstered by the emerging prominence in the mid-1970s of “nothing works” claims from criminological research on rehabilitation (Cullen and Gendreau, 2001).

Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, harsh Republican rhetoric shaped the development of increasingly severe crime control policies such as the development of mandatory minimums and increased penalties for drug crimes. In the early and mid 1990s, the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Bill Clinton, picked up where Reagan had left off and quickly caught up to the harsh crime control rhetoric of the Republican Party. Bill Clinton took the lead in his 1992 campaign to highlight crime control as a central aspect of the Democratic Party platform and thus “detoothed the issue” as a wedge between parties (Clear and Frost, 2014: 6).

As crime rates fell in the late 1990s, crime control became a less prominent feature in platforms for both the Republican and Democratic parties. By the time Al Gore and George W. Bush squared off in the presidential campaign of 2000, domestic crime control had slipped in prominence in partisan platforms (Oliver and Marion, 2008: 405). The terrorist attacks of 9/11 moved domestic street-level crime control further off the radar as international terrorism took up a prominent place in political rhetoric. With crime rates declining and political focus elsewhere, the politics of crime control began swinging toward the emergence of “smart on crime” rhetoric and “what works” policy proposals to develop alternatives to incarceration (Clear and Frost, 2014; Green, 2015).

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new political landscape around crime control had developed. Even though crime control remained less prominent in national-level political rhetoric, the economic collapse of 2008 put the allocation of huge percentages of state budgets to correctional systems into stark relief (Brown, 2013). A new economic imperative emerged to reduce the economic burden of criminal justice on states and Republican political leaders and conservative advocates such as Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and the Koch Brothers became increasingly prominent voices for criminal justice reform. After decades of touting “tough on crime” approaches to crime control, some of the loudest voices for a possible paradigm shift in dealing with crime came from the Republican Party (Beckett et al., 2016; Dagan and Teles, 2016).

While Republican political leaders were vocal proponents of criminal justice reform proposals in the early 2010s, the divisive presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton saw the return of Nixonian “tough on crime” rhetoric from the Republican candidate. While Clinton and the Democrats argued for criminal justice reform and the end to mass incarceration (Frizell, 2015), Trump called for mass deportations of “criminal” immigrants (Ye Hee Lee, 2015) and expanding the use of “stop and frisk” tactics (Friedersdorf, 2016).

Presidential party platforms and moral foundations theory

Studying presidential party platforms is important because they represent the vision and national priorities of political parties (David, 1971). Platforms articulate a set of carefully negotiated policy objectives and frames that define policy issues and social problems, and provide “a quadrennial snapshot of where the parties [are] headed” on critical issues (Mellnik et al., 2016). The frameworks that party platforms provide also model for states priorities and policy approaches on crime control (Oliver and Marion, 2008: 400; Ramirez, 2013; Scheingold, 1991) and have a measurable impact on subsequent legislative agendas (Fagan, 2018). Thus, examining the treatment of crime control by Democrats and Republicans in party platforms over time—as we do here—may provide a richer and more nuanced view of the politics of crime control than has been addressed in research focusing on single issues (e.g., mass incarceration) or state dynamics.

Presidential party platforms are collaboratively crafted statements developed every four years by a platform committee, the party nominee, and convention delegates drawn from every state (Noel, 2013). The relative influence of presidential nominees and other party leaders in shaping party platforms varies from year to year (Galvin, 2010), but incumbent Presidents wield considerable influence in shaping party platforms (Oliver and Marion, 2008). That said, party platforms do not simply reflect the objectives or legislative proposals of a single candidate for office. Rather, as previously noted, party platforms reflect negotiated and carefully articulated sets of priorities and objectives on policy issues.

The federalized design of American government means that the vast majority of crime control legislating and enforcement occurs at the local and state levels (Barker, 2009; Beckett and Sasson, 2000; Lynch, 2011). While most crime control policy and action takes place within states, national parties and their platforms provide rhetorical frameworks that shape “policy environments” across levels of government (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009; Miller, 2008: 79). Platforms are critical texts for understanding party positions and are “valuable sources for analyzing the discursive and ideological content of each political party and how they have viewed and understood policy issues over time” (Alphonso, 2015).

Most prior research using party platforms has focused on describing the emphasis on, or ideological polarization surrounding, various policy issues (Appelrouth, 2019; Coffey, 2011; Harmel, 2018). Other research has employed critical discourse analysis to investigate the treatment of different topics in political party platforms (Kosic and Triandafyllidou, 2004; Pilecki and Hammack, 2015). In research considering crime and social control, a primary approach has been to examine the use of symbolic language (e.g., “getting tough on crime”) vs. substantive policy proposals (e.g., hiring more police) in party platforms (Marion and Oliver, 2010; Oliver and Marion, 2008).

In the current study, we employ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an analytic lens through which to understand the values invoked in party platform statements on crime and crime control. MFT is frequently used as a tool for describing moral foundations invoked in political rhetoric (Bowe, 2018; Neiman et al., 2016) and, as we will argue, is especially well suited to the task of systematically examining the invocation of key moral values in political statements about crime.

According to MFT, there are five core moral foundations (Haidt, 2007, 2012).³ The care foundation focuses on caring for others and protecting people’s safety. Fairness reflects concerns about equality of treatment, proportionality, reciprocity, and cheating.⁴ Authority taps into respect for and obedience to authority, social traditions, and hierarchies. The loyalty foundation reflects concerns about loyalty to and sacrifice for one’s in-group whether that be family, nation, or community. The purity foundation relates to the perceived virtues of bodily sanctity and the protection of innocence. Different cultures and subcultures emphasize different sets of moral foundations, and as a result, members of different social groups often exhibit different patterns of moral foundation endorsement (Graham et al., 2011; 2013).

In the United States, conservative and liberal ideologies are thought to be rooted in different sets of moral concerns (Graham et al., 2009; Janoff-Bulman, 2009; Lakoff, 2002; Miles and Vaisey, 2015).⁵ Conservative ideology tends to draw on all five moral foundations, with an emphasis on the “binding” moral foundations: authority, loyalty, purity. These binding foundations are rooted in Durkheimian concerns about the protection of groups and the value of loyalty in shaping healthy nations, communities, and families (Haidt, 2012: 193; Silver and Silver, 2017). Liberal ideology, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on the “individualizing” moral foundations: care and fairness. The individualizing foundations reflect Millian concerns about equality, individual rights, protecting people, and the prevention of harm (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt and Graham, 2007; Silver and Silver, 2017).

MFT suggests that the Democratic and Republican parties may differ in the extent to which they invoke “binding” and “individualizing” moral concerns in their messages to the public. Specifically, Haidt argues that while both Democrats and Republicans appeal to care and fairness, “Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and military values) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions)” and for “Christian ideas about sanctity and sexuality” (Haidt, 2012, pp. 181-182). Research examining the moral content of communications by politicians (e.g., interviews, Twitter messages) is mixed, suggesting that in practice, the use of moral language by political figures may be more nuanced (Jones et al., 2018; Neiman et al., 2016; Sterling and Jost, 2018). However, research has yet to explore the moral foundations used in the more formal and policy-oriented communications put forth by political parties more broadly.

Broadly, MFT is a useful framework because it allows each of the moral foundations to be assessed independently of one another, and thus it can be used to inductively capture the ideological “flavor” of parties (Haidt, 2013). Thus, given that both the nature and salience of crime control as a political issue and the ideological bases of each party have shifted over the past 70 years (Grossman and Hopkins, 2015), we take advantage of the conceptual flexibility of MFT to explore the latent ideology and moral orientations of both parties’ prescriptive invocations on crime control over time.

Compared to other common approaches for examining statements in party platforms (e.g., considering emphasis, polarization, or symbolism), which tend to focus on single topics or policy issues, MFT allows for a nuanced examination of various moral concerns that may cut across topics or policy issues. MFT does not constrain statements to fall along a liberal-conservative continuum but rather allows for the simultaneous invocation of both traditionally liberal and conservative values. This theoretical feature is especially important in evaluating the underpinnings of crime control policy, which do not always map neatly onto the expected left-right divide (Dagan and Teles, 2016; Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2009: 634). Relatedly, MFT as a theoretical lens does not require the researcher to assume a normative position, in contrast to approaches such as critical discourse analysis, for which ideological commitment is often “an explicit agenda” (Carvalho, 2008: 162; van Dijk, 2009).

It is also important to note that MFT is not the only theoretical framework that could be applied to the study of moral values invoked in political speech. For example, the Freeden-inspired analytic framework for “political criminology” described by Loader and Sparks (2016) posits that “core concepts” of ideology include “liberty and progress for liberalism, tradition for conservatism, equality in the case of socialism” (Freeden, 2013; Loader and Sparks, 2016: 321). Other theories of ideology have described moral frameworks based on the acceptance or rejection of divine authority (Hunter, 1992), parenting metaphors (Lakoff, 2002), social dominance orientations (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999), right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981), or competing value commitments (e.g., benevolence, universalism, authority, power) (Schwartz et al., 2010). We consider the implications and limitations of relying on MFT in our discussion of our findings.

Data

The Policy Agendas Project has created and made publicly available datasets in which the content of sentences or quasi-sentences⁶ (hereafter referred to as statements) within Republican and Democratic presidential platforms were coded into one of 21 major topics and one of 220 subtopics (Wolbrecht, 2016).⁷ The policy platforms were coded for topics in two stages. First, a team of trained research assistants iteratively coded the data. A second phase of coding was then undertaken by professional coders at the Policy Agendas Project to ensure the codes were applied consistently for the many years of data available (Wolbrecht, 2017).

Under the Policy Agendas Project coding scheme, crime, law, and family issues are coded together (major topic code 12). Statements coded under this major topic code primarily address issues such as illegal drugs, court administration, juvenile crime, policing, punishment, and crime prevention.⁸ After reviewing the content of statements, we excluded statements that dealt with family issues (topic subcode 1208) because most of those statements dealt with parenting and were not explicitly crime or crime control related. We also excluded from consideration statements dealing with civil law issues (for which no specific subcode is available). Our dataset thus consisted of thirteen years’ worth of platform statements on crime and crime control for the Democratic and Republican parties from 1968 through 2016.

Research approach and methods

We use summative content analysis to evaluate patterns, contexts, and frequencies of moral foundations in prescriptive platform statements (Hsieh and Sarah, 2005).⁹ The platform content considered here included three basic types of statements: general statements about crime (e.g., “Crime rates have been rising for years”), statements attacking the other party or reflecting on the achievements or failures of prior administrations, and prescriptive statements about policy positions worked out by the presidential candidate and the platform committees. It is this third category of statements that we focused on in our coding. Our focus on prescriptive statements, (e.g., “We will…” or “Republicans urge…” or “Democrats advocate…”) means that the results of our coding reflect the moral foundations of policy positions being explicitly advocated or proposed by each party in each platform year.

Our data analysis began with both authors independently coding the data for the five moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. In our coding process, each prescriptive statement could be coded for multiple moral foundations, if applicable. While one statement might invoke care alone, other statements might invoke both care and authority. Our coding process was foundation-focused rather than issue-focused. So, for example, statements about punishment sometimes invoked the authority foundation (e.g., prison as crime control) while in other contexts they invoked the care foundation (e.g., rehabilitation via probation programs) or fairness (e.g., proportionality or equality in sentencing). We looked to the context of the statements in identifying foundations suffused in the text. Where prescriptive statements were preceded by descriptive statements invoking moral foundations (e.g., “Violence is a problem in many communities. We urge an increase in police force size”), we coded the prescriptive statement for the moral foundation invoked in the contextual statement. During our initial, independent coding process, each author wrote coding memos to record questions that arose in coding and to capture ideas about moral themes and the prevailing substantive topics in the platforms.¹⁰

We compared our independent coding for the first four years of platform data (1968 through 1980) in order to refine our coding process. Our initial inter-coder agreement was 65%.¹¹ In reviewing disagreements in our coding, we collaboratively refined our coding guidelines to clarify how particular examples of statement content and context should be considered in assigning codes. After refining our coding guidelines, we engaged in two more rounds of coding for the first four years of data. Our coding agreement improved to 80% in the second round and reached 94% in the third round of coding. After achieving 94% agreement in our coding for the first four years of data, we used random assignment to divide up the remaining party-years such that each author coded half of the remaining Democratic platforms and half of the Republican platforms. This process of establishing “negotiated agreement” between two coders before deploying the coding scheme to segments of data for independent coding is based on prior evaluations of best practices in large-scale qualitative analysis (Campbell et al., 2013: 307). After the final round of coding was complete, we reviewed our coding for two randomly selected party-years to confirm that our intercoder agreement remained high. Coding was done using NVivo 11 and 12.¹² In order to illustrate the types of statements that were coded for each foundation, Table 1 presents a sample of statements coded as invoking only one moral foundation.

Table 1.

Sample statements coded for each foundation.

Moral Foundation	Democratic Party	Republican Party
Authority	(We will) assure the availability in every metropolitan area of quick, balanced, coordinated control forces, with ample manpower, thoroughly trained and properly equipped, to suppress rioting (1968)	Republican government will work with local law enforcement agencies to apprehend and firmly punish drug pushers and drug smugglers with mandatory sentences where appropriate (1980)
Care	We have to protect them (children) from criminals who prey on them -- and we have to teach them good values and give them something to say yes to, so they stay away from crime and trouble in the first place (1996)	Along with diversion of first-time, nonviolent offenders to community sentencing, accountability courts, drug courts, veterans’ treatment courts, and guidance by faith-based institutions with proven track records of rehabilitation, our platform emphasized restorative justice to make the victim whole and put the offender on the right path (2016)
Fairness	We must improve and streamline courthouse management procedures, require criminal justice records to be accurate and responsible, and establish fair and more uniform sentencing for crimes (1976)	A Republican president will work with Congress to restore justice to the nation's courts and fair play to the practice of law (1996)
Loyalty	Moving forward, we will continue to nominate and confirm judges who are men and women of unquestionable talent and character and will always demonstrate their faithfulness to our law and our Constitution and bring with them a sense of how American society works and how the American people live (2012)	First, we believe that Republican economic proposals, more particularly those proposals which strengthen society and smaller communities discussed elsewhere in this document, will go a long way toward stabilizing American society (1980)
Purity	No statements were coded as invoking only purity in the Democratic Party platforms	The work presently being done to tighten the anti-obscenity provisions of the criminal code has our full support(1976)

Results

Prevalence of coded statements

Overall, we coded 857 statements as prescriptive and invoking one or more moral foundation (387 for the Democratic Party; 470 for the Republican Party). The aggregate percentage of coded statements in the Republican crime control platforms was lower (44%) than for Democrats (56%) because the crime-oriented portions of the overall Republican platforms were longer (1073 statements) than for Democrats (694 statements). Figure 1 indicates the pattern over time in the percentage of platform statements on crime that were coded as prescriptive and invoking one or more moral foundation.

Figure 1.

Percentage of prescriptive moral statements within democratic and republican platforms on crime control, 1968–2016.

Overall invocations of the moral foundations

Our coding strategy allowed statements to be coded as invoking multiple moral foundations, if applicable. Table 2 presents the total number of appearances of each foundation, the number of appearances for each party, and the within-party percentages and standard deviations for both parties over time. The numbers in Table 2 add up to more than the number of statements coded (857) because statements could be coded with multiple foundations. The within-party percentages add to 100%.

Table 2.

Total coding for each moral foundation overall and within parties.

		Democratic Party			Republican Party
Moral Foundation	Total #	Dem #	Within-Party %	SD Over Time	Rep #	Within-Party %	SD Over Time
Authority	437	181	28	5	256	34	3
Care	419	207	32	4	212	28	3
Fairness	296	159	24	5	137	18	4
Loyalty	175	85	13	7	90	12	6
Purity	91	25	4	8	66	9	6

Authority and care made up the largest number of total coding instances and within-party percentages for both parties. While both parties frequently invoked authority and care, the Democratic Party, across all of the years examined, leaned more on care (e.g., “We are determined that the citizen must be protected in his home and on his streets,” 1972), and the Republican Party leaned more on authority (e.g., “We will use our armed forces in the war on drugs to the maximum extent possible,” 1988). Fairness was a close third in the within-party percentages for Democrats and a more distant third for Republicans. Both parties relied less frequently on loyalty and purity. The Democratic Party indicated more variability in their invocations to each foundation over time compared with the Republican Party (the mean within-party percentage for both parties and all five foundations over time was 8%).

Statement-level coding for each party

Table 3 presents the findings for the total number and percentage of statements coded for all possible combinations of moral foundations within each party. Care alone was the most frequent coding for prescriptive Democratic statements. For Republicans, authority alone was the most frequently coded moral foundation. For both parties, authority, care, and fairness alone were the top three moral foundations coded.

Table 3.

Number and percentages for all possible moral foundation co-occurrences for each party.

Moral Foundation(s)	Dem #	Dem %	Rep #	Rep %
Authority Alone	49	13	101	21
Fairness Alone	60	16	53	11
Care Alone	68	18	60	13
Loyalty Alone	6	2	20	4
Purity Alone	0	0	12	3
Authority Fairness	26	7	22	5
Authority Care	34	9	39	8
Authority Loyalty	24	6	25	5
Authority Purity	4	1	11	2
Fairness Care	36	9	24	5
Fairness Loyalty	2	1	1	0
Fairness Purity	1	0	2	0
Care Loyalty	15	4	12	3
Care Purity	5	1	20	4
Loyalty Purity	2	1	5	1
Authority Fairness Care	14	4	23	5
Authority Fairness Loyalty	6	2	4	1
Authority Fairness Purity	0	0	0	0
Authority Care Loyalty	9	2	14	3
Authority Care Purity	4	1	11	2
Authority Loyalty Purity	0	0	2	0
Fairness Care Loyalty	9	2	3	1
Fairness Care Purity	0	0	1	0
Fairness Loyalty Purity	0	0	0	0
Care Loyalty Purity	2	1	1	0
Authority Fairness Care Loyalty	4	1	3	1
Authority Fairness Loyalty Purity	0	0	0	0
Authority Fairness Care Purity	1	0	1	0
Authority Care Loyalty Purity	6	2	0	0
Fairness Care Loyalty Purity	0	0	0	0
Totals	387	100%	470	100%

For statements that were coded for more than one moral foundation, authority was the most frequently co-occurring foundation. Statements coded for authority and care, for example, made up 9% of all coded statements for the Democratic Party and 8% for the Republican Party. When discussing efforts to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, The Democratic Party in 1972, for example, stated, “We are determined to exert the maximum power and authority of the federal government to protect the many victims who cannot help themselves against great criminal combinations.” The Republican Party combined care and authority in 1972 proposed prison reform efforts, saying, “We believe the correctional system not only should punish, but also should educate and rehabilitate.”

Binding, individualizing, and combination statements

We evaluated the percentage of coded statements in each party-year that were coded only for binding foundations (authority, loyalty, purity) or individualizing foundations (fairness, care), or for a combination of both. For individualizing-only statements, for example, we tallied the number of statements that were coded for fairness alone, care alone, and for fairness and care. We then calculated the percentage of coded statements in each party-year that reflected purely individualizing foundations. Table 4 shows the within-party numbers, percentages, and standard deviations over time.

Table 4.

Binding-only, individualizing-only, and combination statements in within-party coding.

	Democratic Party			Republican Party
Statement Type	#	%	SD Over Time	#	%	SD Over Time
Binding-Only	85	22	11	176	37	11
Individualizing-Only	164	42	22	137	29	11
Combination	138	36	20	157	33	11
Total	387	100		470	100

As MFT predicts, the Republican Party relied most on binding statements. For example, in 2016 the Republican Party invoked both authority and loyalty when talking about police: “The men and women of law enforcement - whether patrolling our neighborhoods or our borders, fighting organized crime or guarding against domestic terror - deserve our gratitude and support.” The Democratic Party relied most on individualizing statements. In 2016, for example, the Democratic Party invoked fairness and care when discussing correctional policy: “We will remove barriers to help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully re-enter society by “banning the box,” expanding reentry programs, and restoring voting rights.”

Almost half (42%) of all statements coded for the Democratic Party were coded only with fairness and/or care. While the Republican Party had more statements that combined individualizing and binding foundations, combination statements made up a greater percentage of the moral invocations for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party also exhibited more variability in reliance on exclusively individualizing and combination statements over time compared with the Republican Party.

Figure 2 indicates that the Democratic platforms of the 1970s through the early 1980s featured greater and increasing reliance on individualizing moral invocations than on binding or combination statements. It was in those years that Democrats put a particular emphasis in their platforms on the ways in which social and economic forces shape drug use and crime and the need for equal treatment under the law. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, however, Democratic Party invocations on crime control relied more heavily on statements that featured combinations of individualizing and binding foundations.

Figure 2.

Individualizing, binding, or combination statements as % of coded democratic moral invocations, 1968–2016.

These data show that as the Democratic Party sought to “detooth” crime as a political issue by advocating tougher positions on drugs and juvenile crime (Clear and Frost, 2014) they employed increasingly broad moral invocations—that is, invocations to moral foundations likely to motivate support among both liberals and conservatives. In 1984, for example, while Mondale’s Democratic platform addressed poverty as an underlying structural contributor to crime, it also noted that social issues should not “be used as an excuse” for crime. From 2004 through 2016, Democrats relied increasingly on individualizing statements and their reliance on binding statements and combination statements dropped. In those years, the focus of the Democratic Party turned to addressing disparities in the criminal justice system, improving police-citizen relationships, and protecting victims while aiding those accused of crime.

Figure 3 indicates that in the period from 1968 through 1984, the Republican Party relied on a more even distribution of individualizing, binding, and combination statements than the Democratic Party. While Republicans in those platform years advocated for mandatory minimum sentences and other punitive responses to crime, those policy positions were often coupled with an emphasis on the prevention of crime and providing assistance as people reentered the community after incarceration. They talked about wanting a system that is “fair but firm” (1980) and advocated for “justice for everyone” (1972). From 1988 to 2000, Republican Party platforms relied more heavily on binding moral invocations on crime control as they focused on protecting the nation and communities by combating illegal drugs and pursuing zero tolerance approaches to crime.

Figure 3.

Individualizing, binding, or combination statements as % of coded republican moral invocations, 1968–2016.

In 2004, George W. Bush’s Republican platform relied more on statements that combined categories of moral foundations as they focused on terrorism and border security, and from 2004 through 2012 Republicans relied more on individualizing moral invocations as they began advocating for the diversion of some offenders and as they put a focus on the “overcriminalization of behavior” (2012) and the roles of faith-based organizations to help combat crime and drug abuse. In 2016, reliance on individualizing statements leveled off and binding statements increased as Donald Trump’s Republican platform focused on securing the border, ensuring that people convicted of violent crimes not be released early under revisions to mandatory penalties, and on combating rising crime in some cities.

Discussion

Prior research on the politics of crime control has considered the salience and substance of partisan positions on crime in recent decades (Beckett et al., 2016; Dagan and Teles, 2016; Murakawa, 2014). Our top-line findings conform with prior observations about partisan shifts in the politics of punishment, with the Democratic Party shifting to more conservative positions on crime in the 1990s and both parties becoming more liberal in the early 21^st century. This indicates that MFT can be a useful tool in mapping ideological shifts on crime control. Additionally, our novel approach allows us to push beyond observed partisan ideological positions on crime to reveal underlying intra- and interparty patterns of invocations to moral foundations such as authority, fairness, and care, and to combinations of “binding” and “individualizing” foundations. By unpacking partisan positions into their constituent elements, a richer and more comprehensive picture of the foundations of partisan shifts on crime control is achieved. As Loader and Sparks note, this kind of analysis is designed to “reveal and decode, not to praise or dismiss, ideological formations,” to “advance understanding of crime control in ways not accomplished by two common tendencies in the literature on penal politics: one that deploys relevant terms - notably liberal and conservative - as if their meanings were somehow self-evident and their social and political effects well established” (Loader and Sparks, 2016: 325).

Our findings suggest that out of the five moral foundations suggested by MFT as key indicators of liberal and conservative ideology, two moral foundations, authority and care, have been particularly prominent in both Democratic and Republican Party prescriptive platforms statements on crime control. While the Democratic Party has been more ideologically liberal on crime control (emphasizing so-called individualizing foundations and care in particular), the party has also experienced more variation in moral invocations over time and has, in some periods, relied more on conservative moral foundations than the Republican Party. Statements invoking only binding foundations, usually with an emphasis on authority, or both binding and individualizing foundations, were more common than individualizing-only statements in Democrats’ platforms from 1988 through 2008.¹³ As the Democratic Party sought to claim the mantle of being “tough on crime,” particularly in the 1990s (Beckett, 1997), party platforms were infused with invocations to authority. In the last decade, the Democratic Party has returned to framing crime control in individual-oriented terms; relying more on exclusively individualizing statements and less on exclusively binding statements.

These results cast some doubt on moral foundations scholars’ contention that Democrats have, since the 1960s, focused too narrowly on “helping victims and fighting for the rights of the oppressed” while Republicans appealed to all five foundations (Haidt, 2012: 182). We see in these findings a parallel with other research suggesting that increasing polarization between parties in the last decade can be attributed more to increasing liberalism within the Democratic Party rather than to any shifts within the Republican Party (Economist, 2019; Edsall, 2019; Saad et al., 2019; Tesler, 2016). Within the extant literature on the politics of crime control, in particular, much more research has considered shifts in the platforms and policies advocated by conservatives and the Republican Party (Beckett, 2018; Dagan and Teles, 2016) than has considered the role of liberals and the Democratic Party in the overall dynamics of the politics of crime control (Murakawa, 2014). Our findings suggest more research is needed with the latter orientation.

From the late 1990s through 2016, there was a downward shift in both parties’ use of binding foundations, and from 2004 through 2016 both parties used more exclusively individualizing statements in their crime control platforms. This suggests that the increasing focus within the Republican Party on “right on crime” perspectives, which have emphasized reliance on faith-based programs and supporting reentry after prison (via legislation such as the Second Chance Act of 2007) (Dagan and Teles, 2016), have been supported by or reflected in an increase in use of statements that tap into care and/or fairness as Republicans have adopted “a new language for criminal justice reform” (Dagan and Teles, 2016: 65). These trends lend support to the idea that both Democrats and Republicans have, overall, moved to the left on crime control in the twenty-first century. They are also consistent with overall trends in Western society to emphasize the needs and rights of individuals over those of groups (Pinker, 2011). Similarly, these results echo research suggesting that the use of individual-centered moral language has increased in public discussions of social control issues (Gandsman, 2016; Thomas, 2013; Weitzer, 2009).

It is worth noting, however, that both parties have exhibited short-term trends in moral foundations that do not track with these broader cultural shifts but may rather reflect party responses to external events or targeted efforts to reach voters. For example, Democrats’ uptick in binding-only language in 2004 may have been in reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Indeed, research has linked terrorism events to an increased emphasis on binding moral foundations among liberals (Van de Vyver et al., 2016). Along similar lines, it is plausible that the Republicans Party’s increased use of binding-only statements in 2016 may have been intended to increase voting among the white working class, who turned out in unprecedented numbers in the 2016 election and who tend to weigh binding moral foundations heavily in their support for Republican candidates (Prasad et al., 2009).

It is important to point out some of the limitations of the approach utilized in this research. Methodologically, our approach involved summative content coding in order to show the prevalence of moral foundations for both parties over time. We present descriptive data on moral foundations but did not engage in quantitative analysis of our data. Future research might evaluate the patterns of moral foundations over time using quantitative approaches such as latent growth curve modeling. In addition, our coding was not blinded to party or year, which leaves open the potential for confirmation bias in our approach despite our best efforts to read platform statements objectively and our commitment to establishing inter-coder agreement.

Theoretically, although MFT appears to have considerable empirical backing (Graham et al., 2018), consensus regarding the full taxonomy of moral dimensions does not yet exist, and even within MFT, arguments have been made for both condensing (Harper, 2020) or expanding (Iyer et al., 2012) the number of moral domains considered “foundational.” Relatedly, MFT has been criticized as a theory of ideology. For example, Smith et al. (2017) show that endorsement of moral foundations is variable over time and argue that moral foundations reflect, rather than underlie, political preferences. Similarly, other research argues that—contrary to MFT’s claims (Koleva et al., 2012)— moral foundations derive from right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientations rather than predispose individuals to endorse them (Federico et al., 2013; Kugler et al., 2014). Thus, it will be useful for future research to employ alternative theoretical models in evaluating the moral frameworks and underlying values invoked in party positions on crime and crime control.

Future research should also evaluate at a more granular level varieties of values or more “peripheral concepts” such as “elitism, nationalism and localism” (Loader and Sparks, 2016: 321). This is especially important given the contention that future work “will have to pay careful attention to “peripheral” concepts, as the hinge between an ideology’s core commitments and its advocates’ attempts to speak to particular policy questions” (Loader and Sparks, 2016: 328). It will also be useful for future research to engage in more in-depth coding of political platforms, speeches, and other texts both at the national and state levels. Future research could focus in on particular crime control issues, decarceration efforts or the death penalty for example, at the local, state, and/or national levels. In addition, future research might consider the ways in which partisan invocations to moral foundations on crime control have moved over time in relation to invocations on the closely related issues of race, welfare, and immigration. By considering the intersections of moral foundations on social control policies and platforms, broadly conceived, a more complete and commensurately complex understanding of partisan ideology can be developed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Noelle Wyman Roth for her assistance with using Nvivo for this project.

ORCID iD

Elizabeth K Brown

Notes

Elizabeth K Brown is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research focuses on the politics of crime and crime control, moral invocations in political rhetoric and personal narratives, determinants of public views, and the roles of public views in penal policymaking. Her recent work has been published in Punishment and Society, Crime and Delinquency, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

Jason R Silver is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–Newark. He received his PhD in criminal justice from the University at Albany in 2018. Broadly, his research centers on moral intuition and ideology as drivers of attitudes and behaviors related to crime and criminal justice. His published work appears in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Law and Human Behavior, Law and Society Review, and Punishment and Society.

Correction (June 2023):

Article updated to correct spelling of the second author's affiliation.

References

Alphonso

(2015) From need to hope: The American family and poverty in partisan discourse, 1900-2012. Journal of Policy History 27(4): 592–635.

Altemeyer

(1981) Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Winniped, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press.

Appelrouth

(2019) Envisioning America and the American Self: Republican and Democratic Party Platforms, 1840-2016. Abington, Oxon: Routledge.

Barker

(2009) The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Baumgartner

F R

Jones

B D

(2009) Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Beckett

(1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford.

Beckett

(2018) The politics, promise, and peril of criminal justice reform in the context of mass incarceration. Annual Review of Criminology 1(1): 235–259.

Beckett

Reosti

Knaphus

(2016) The end of an era? understanding the contradictions of criminal justice reform. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 664(1): 238–259.

Beckett

Sasson

(2000) The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

10.

Beckett

Western

(2001) Governing social marginality: Welfare, incarceration and the transformation of state policy. Punishment & Society 3: 43–59.

11.

Bowe

(2018) Permitted to build? Moral foundations in newspaper framing of mosque construction controversies. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 95(3): 782–810.

12.

Brown

(2013) Foreclosing on incarceration? State correctional policy enactments and the great recession. Criminal Justice Policy Review 24(3): 317–337.

13.

Brown

Socia

K M

(2017) Twenty-first century punitiveness: Social sources of punitive American views reconsidered. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 33(4): 935–959. doi:10.1007/s10940-016-9319-4

14.

Campbell

(2014) The emergence of penal extremism in California: A dynamic view of institutional structures and political processes. Law & Society Review 48(2): 377–409. doi:10.1111/lasr.12072

15.

Campbell

Quincy

Osserman

, et al. (2013) Coding in-depth semistructured interviews: Problems of unitization and intercoder reliability and agreement. Sociological Methods & Research 42(3): 294–320.

16.

Campbell MC, Schoenfeld H and Vaughan P (2020) Same old song and dance? An analysis of legislative activity in a period of penal reform. Punishment & Society 22(4): 389–412.

17.

Carvalho

(2008) Media(ted) discourse and society: Rethinking the framework of critical discourse analysis. Journalism Studies 9(2): 161–177.

18.

Clear

Frost

N A

(2014) The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America. New York: New York University Press.

19.

Clifford

Jerit

(2013) How words do the work of politics: Moral foundations theory and the debate over stem cell research. The Journal of Politics 75(3): 659–671.

20.

Coffey

(2011) More than a dime’s worth: Using state party platforms to assess the degree of American party polarization. PS: Political Science & Politics 44(02): 331–337.

21.

Cullen

Gendreau

(2001) From nothing works to what works: Changing professional ideology in the 21st century. The Prison Journal 81(3): 313–338.

22.

Dagan

Teles

(2016) Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned against Mass Incarceration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

23.

David

(1971) Party platforms as national plans. Public Administration Review 31(3): 303–315.

24.

Economist

(2019, June 15) Left nation: Donald trump’s presidency has moved America left. The Economist. Available at: www.economist.com/united-states/2019/06/15/donald-trumps-presidency-has-moved-america-left (accessed 5 July 2019).

25.

Edsall

(2019, June 19) Trump is changing the shape of the democratic party, too, opinion. The New York Times. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/trump-racial-resentment.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

26.

Fagan

(2018) Marching orders? U.S. Party platforms and legislative agenda setting 1948-2014. Political Research Quarterly 71(4): 949–959.

27.

Federico

Weber

Ergun

, et al. (2013) Mapping the connections between politics and morality: the multiple sociopolitical orientations involved in moral intuition. Political Psychology 34(4): 589–610.

28.

Freeden M (2013) The Morphological Analysis of Ideology. In: Freeden M and Stears M (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (pp. 115–137). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

29.

Friedersdorf

(2016). Donald Trump's police state. The Atlantic. Available at: www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/donald-trump-stop-and-frisk-blacks-round-up-millions-of-hispanics/501032/

30.

Frizell

(2015) Hillary Clinton calls for an end to 'mass incarceration'. Time. Available at: http://time.com/3839892/hillary-clinton-calls-for-an-end-to-mass-incarceration/

31.

Galvin

(2010) Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

32.

Gandsman

(2016) A recipe for elider abuse: Drom sin to risk in anti-euthanasia activism. Death Studies 40(9): 578–588.

33.

Garland

(2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

34.

Gottschalk

(2006) The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. New York: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Gottschalk

(2015) Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

36.

Gottshalk

(2015) Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

37.

Graham

Haidt

Koleva

, et al. (2013) Moral foundatons theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47: 55–130.

38.

Graham

Haidt

Motyl

, et al. (2018) Moral foundations theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism. In: Gray

Graham

(eds) Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, pp. 211–222.

39.

Graham

Haidt

Nosek

B A

(2009) Liberals and conservatives rely on differents sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(5): 1029–1046.

40.

Graham

Nosek

Haidt

, et al. (2011) Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101(2): 366–385.

41.

Green

(2015) US penal-reform catalysts, drivers, and prospects. Punishment & Society 17(3): 271–298.

42.

Grossman

Hopkins

D A

(2015) Ideological republicans and group interest democrats: the asymmetry of American party politics. Perspectives on Politics 13(1): 119–139.

43.

Haidt

(2007) The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science 316(5827): 998–1001.

44.

Haidt

(2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

45.

Haidt

(2013) Of freedom and fairness. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Available at: http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/28/of-freedom-and-fairness/

46.

Haidt

Graham

(2007) When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research 20(1): 98–116.

47.

Harmel

(2018) The how’s and why’s of party manifestos: Some guidance for a cross-national research agenda. Party Politics 24(3): 229–239.

48.

Harper

(2020) Revising the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. PsyarXiv Preprints.

49.

Hsieh

H-FS

Sarah

(2005) Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research 15(9): 1277–1288.

50.

Hunter

J D

(1992) Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group.

51.

Iyer

Koleva

Graham

, et al. (2012) Understanding libertarian morality: the psychological dispositions of self-identifed libertarians. PLOS One 7(8): e42366.

52.

Janoff-Bulman

(2009) To provide or protect: Motivational bases of political liberalism and conservatism. Psychological Inquiry 20(2–3): 120–128.

53.

Jones

K L

Noorbaloochi

Jost

J T

, et al. (2018) Liberal and conservative values: What can we learn from congressional tweets. Political Psychology 39(2): 423–443. doi:doi: 10.1111/pops.12415

54.

Koleva

Graham

Iyer

, et al. (2012) Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially purity) help explain culture war attitudes. Journal of Research in Personality 46(2): 184–194.

55.

Kosic

Triandafyllidou

(2004) Representations of the European Union and the nation(-state) in Italian party discourse: A critical analysis of electoral platforms and parliamentary debates. Journal of Language and Politics 3(1): 53–80.

56.

Kugler

Jost

J T

Noorbaloochi

(2014) Another look at moral foundations theory: Do authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain liberal-conservative differences in “moral” intuitions? Social Justice Research 27(4): 413–431.

57.

Lakoff

(2002) Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

58.

Laver

Benoit

Garry

(2003) Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. The American Political Science Review 97(02): 311–331.

59.

Loader

Sparks

(2016) Ideologies and crime: Political ideas and the dynamics of crime control. Global Crime 17(3-4): 314–330.

60.

Lynch

(2011) Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence. Criminology & Public Policy 10(3): 673–698. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00733.x

61.

Marion

(1995) A Primer in the Politics of Criminal Justice. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

62.

Marion

Oliver

W M

(2010) Symbolic politics, criminal justice policy, and third political party platforms. Criminal Justice Policy Review 21(4): 476–499.

63.

Mellnik

Alcantara

Uhrmacher

(2016). What republicans and democrats have disagreed on, from 1856 to today. The Washington post. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/conventions/party-platform-evolution/

64.

Miles

(2016) Presidential appeals to moral foundations: How modern presidents persuade cross-ideologues. Policy Studies Journal 44(4): 471–421.

65.

Miles

Vaisey

(2015) Morality and politics: Comparing alternate theories. Social Science Research 53: 252–269.

66.

Miller

(2008) The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

67.

Murakawa

(2014) The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

68.

Neiman

Gonzalez

Wilkinson

, et al. (2016) Speaking different languages or reading from the same script? Word usage of democratic and republican politicians. Political Communication 33(2): 346–349.

69.

Nicholson-Crotty

Peterson

Ramirez

(2009) Dynamic representation(s): Federal criminal justice policy and an alternative dimension of public mood. Political Behavior 31(4): 629–655.

70.

Noel

(2013) Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

71.

Oliver

Marion

N E

(2008) Political party platforms: Symbolic politics and criminal justice policy. Criminal Justice Policy Review 19(4): 397–413.

72.

Page

(2012). Why Punishment is Purple. Available at: http://thesocietypages.org/papers/purple-punishment/files/1356/purple-punishment.html

73.

Pilecki

Hammack

P L

(2015) Invoking “the family” to legitimize gender and sexuality based public policies in the United States: A critical discourse analysis of the 2012 democratic and republican national party conventions. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3(1): 8–23.

74.

Pinker

(2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York, NY: Viking.

75.

Prasad

Perrin

Bezila

, et al. (2009) The underserving rich: “moral values” and the white working class. Sociological Forum 24(2): 225–252.

76.

Ramirez

M D

(2013) Americans’ changing views on crime and punishment. Public Opinion Quarterly 77(4): 1006–1031.

77.

Saad

Jones

J M

Brenan

(2019) Understanding shifts in democratic party ideology. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/246806/understanding-shifts-democratic-party-ideology.aspx

78.

Scheingold

S A

(1991) The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

79.

Schwartz

Caprara

G V

Vecchione

(2010) Basic personal values, core political values, and voting: a longitudinal analysis. Political Psychology 31(3): 421–452.

80.

Sidanius

Pratto

(1999) Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

81.

Silver

(2017) Why are conservatives more punitive than liberals? A moral foundations approach. Law and Human Behavior 41(3): 258–272.

82.

Simon

(2007) Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

83.

Smith KB, Alford JR, Hibbing JR, Martin NG, and Hatemi PK (2017) Intuitive ethics and political orientations: Testing moral foundations as a theory of political ideology. American Journal of Political Science 61(2): 424–437.

84.

Sterling

Jost

J T

(2018) Moral discourse in the twitterverse: Effects of ideology and political sophistication on language use among U.S. citizens and members of congress. Journal of Language and Politics 17(2): 195–221.

85.

Tesler

(2016) Pos-Racial or Most-Racial: Race and Politics in the Obama Era. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

86.

Thomas

(2013) Outsourcing moral authority: the internal secularization of evangelicals’ anti-pornography narratives. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52(3): 457–475.

87.

Tonry

(2004) Thinking about Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

88.

Tonry

(2009) Explanations of American punishment: a national history. Punishment & Society 11: 377–394.

89.

Van de Vyver

Houston

D M

Abrams

, et al. (2016) Boosting belligerence: How the July 7, 2005, London bombings affected liberals’ moral foundations and prejudice. Psychological Science 27(2): 169–177. doi:DOI: 10.1177/0956797615615584

90.

van Dijk

(2009). In Wodak

Meyer

(eds) Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, pp. 62–84.

91.

Wacquant

(2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

92.

Weaver

V M

(2007) Frontlash: Race and the development of punitive crime policy. Studies in American Political Development 21(2): 230–265.

93.

Weitzer

(2009) Sociology of sex work. Annual Review of Sociology 35(1): 213–234.

94.

Wolbrecht

(2016) American Political Party Platforms: 1948. 2016.

95.

Wolbrecht

(2017) [Personal correspondence].

96.

Wozniak

K H

(2016) Ontological insecurity, racial tension, and confidence in the police in the shadow of urban unrest. Sociological Forum 31(4): 1063–1082.

97.

Ye Hee Lee

(2015) Donald Trump’s false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime. Washington Post.

The moral foundations of crime control in American presidential platforms,1968–2016

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

A brief history of the partisan politics of crime control in the twentieth and early twenty-first century

Presidential party platforms and moral foundations theory

Data

Research approach and methods

Results

Prevalence of coded statements

Overall invocations of the moral foundations

Statement-level coding for each party

Binding, individualizing, and combination statements

Discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iD

Notes

Correction (June 2023):

References