Culture, institutions, and urban officials' responses to morality issues

This article focuses on city officials' actions when morality issues (gay rights, pornography regulations, etc.) are at stake. Cases drawn from a systematic sample of cities reveal a continuum of local officials' actions ranging from actions unfavorable to activists to evasion of the issue to actions favorable to activists. In order to account for this variation, hypotheses are developed that identify institutional arrangements, ideology of issue activists, and the community's cultural context as key explanatory concepts. Empirical tests show that (a) officials in cities with more developed counter-cultural elements handle morality issues differently than officials in cities where orthodox/traditional sub-cultural elements dominate, (b) narrower measures of community demand/preferences specific to particular kinds of incidents are less useful in predicting governmental action on these issues, (c) institutions (ward versus at-large council elections; mayor versus city manager executive) are important in mediating the expectations or pressures stemming from the local sub-culture, and (d) official actions vary considerably depending upon the ideological stance and degree of controversiality of issue activists, but this too is contingent on the mediating effects of institutional arrangements.