The Moral Foundations of Crime Control: Mapping the Moral Foundations of American Political Party Platforms, 1948-2016

• In Event: State and Federal Responses to Crime

Abstract

The past sixty years have seen considerable shifts in the salience of crime control as a party platform, in the framing of crime, and in orientations of both the Democratic and Republican Parties to addressing it. In an effort to better understand the dynamics of partisan shifts in crime control and interconnected issues (race, immigration, and social welfare), the present research evaluates the moral content of party platform language on these issues from 1948 through 2016. Our analysis is shaped by Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt, 2012) which suggests that conservative and liberal ideologies are rooted in different sets of moral concerns such as Fairness, Harm, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. We use text-analysis to inductively evaluate the moral content and underlying ideologies of party platforms addressing crime control issues.

Authors

• Elizabeth K Brown, University of Massachusetts, Boston

• Jasmine R. Silver, University at Albany, SUNY