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Abstract
How do emotion and reason relate in collective action? An important site for the investigation of this question is the phenomenon of the moral panic. Sociologists researching moral panics have emphasized that the phenomenon often involves strong pressure for political reforms, and recent political science research has examined moral panic as a framework for understanding policy diffusion. This study contributes to a developing synthesis of these two bodies of literature through a qualitative examination of the translation between moral panic and legislation. I examine two sets of cases, both involving horrific violence and public outrage. First, I examine cases of sex offender moral panic in the 90’s. Then I turn to the social reaction to mass gun violence in the 00’s and 10’s. I focus on two policies which diffused among states as responses to public concern about both of these problems: Psychiatric civil commitment in the former cases and extreme risk protection orders (ERPO) in the latter. Both of these policies respond to public outrage by targeting mental illness as the cause of violence to be controlled. But while both policies have a similar psychiatric basis, ERPO is much more limited in scope, and not all states have adopted each policy. Why is the legislative response to gun violence milder compared to the response to sexual violence, and why do some states adopt moral panic legislation when others do not? In this study, I find that moral panic creates political resource. Groups struggle to monopolize the response to the sense of a problem created by moral panics. Groups seek to advance solutions which suit their own particular interests. The presence of guns as “mediating machines” allows for a much higher degree of partisan conflict over the response to violence, which in turn is more likely to deadlock legislative response.