The Mood of America in the 1980s: Some Further Observations on Sociomoral Issues

Abstract

The entry of the New Christian Right into the American political arena in the 1980s provoked a number of scholarly controversies including a debate about the orientation of Americans to politicized sociomoral issues. This chapter explores one of the controversies about so-called “Moral Majority” politics, namely, a debate about the orientation of Americans to issues that were politicized by the New Christian Right. The findings thus suggest that the mood of America in the 1980s regarding certain sociomoral issues was a mixture of conservatism and ambivalence. As the decade began, more Americans were ambivalent as measured here than they were consistently conservative. The chapter begins with an exploration of the relationship between latent class analysis and the typification of political arenas. Converse’s analysis can be generalized into a typology of political arenas that has the desirable property of providing a guide for the detection of types of political arenas in survey data.