Elaine Sharp's book examines the political climate and specifics of the local policy debate, authorization, and implementation associated with a number of controversial issues: casino gambling projects and regulation/prohibition of “sex industries,” as well as municipal support for/opposition to gay rights and provision of abortion and addiction services. Using the blanket notion of morality politics to characterize these matters, Sharp looks at local-level political/policy debates in 10 metropolitan areas during the 1990s. With this number of cities available for comparative analysis, she structures her numerous city/issue narratives by way of four independent variables: local cultural climate, local economic climate, municipal institutional structure, and intergovernmental relationships.

While the latter of these variables is employed in an ad hoc fashion—that is, when variations in city-by-city policy adoption seem to be attributable to specific city/state or city/federal interactions—the first three are developed as dichotomous factors: Cities are classified as reflecting conventional or unconventional cultures based on six demographic measures (such as percentage of women in the workforce and percentage of the population unaffiliated with an institutional religion), as experiencing economic growth or decline, and as possessing a reformed or unreformed government structure (which, Sharp concedes, turns out to be a murky distinction). The application of these variables to the many case studies presented in this volume—typically single-city cases, but on occasion two- or three-city comparisons—makes for a fragmentary narrative. There are so many trees here that locating the forest becomes quite a challenge. On many occasions, one encounters such expressions as “a complicated set of unique circumstances” (p. 83), “idiosyncratic problems” (p. 84), or “idiosyncratic factors” (p. 200) when local events do not conform to the analytical structure. At other points, Sharp breaks from the four-variable framework to consider alternative causal possibilities. For instance, at the end of the chapter on abortion politics, she examines the 10 cities' Latino population proportions, concluding that this demographic feature has not affected individual cities' abortion debates. This reads like a snap judgment, given that there is no discussion of the degree of Latino political mobilization across these cities, nor even acknowledgment that the Latino portion of the local electorate might be a more useful measure of Latino political “presence” than percentage of population.

In her concluding chapter, Sharp characterizes her overall findings as “contingent,” making her strongest claims for the following generalizations. In the case of “pure morality” issues—that is, local morality conflicts in which economic interests do not come into play—the local cultural climate is the controlling factor. Communities classified as unconventional tend to support more innovative, less tradition-bound policies. However, policy choice will tend to follow the preferences of strong, mobilized economic interests if the latter are in one way or another affected by alternative courses of action. Sharp characterizes such policy debates as questions of “material morality” (for example, the tolerance of “gentlemen's clubs” in cities catering to conventions and trade shows). In the author's words (p. 197), “subcultural differences are very important for our understanding of morality issues, unless they are eclipsed by economic considerations.”

But what are the subcultural differences among these 10 cities? They are six demographic measures that have been associated with attitudinal preferences running along what can be termed a conventional/unconventional spectrum. Sharp scores five of her cities on the conventional side of the spectrum and five on the unconventional side. It is interesting that based on her view that the culture/subculture factor is more than simply a question of local attitudes and particular conditions (and, wishing to preserve the anonymity of sources)—“the emphasis here is on the theoretically relevant context that each city provides rather than the uniqueness of each city” (p. 26)—Sharp disguises the identities of the case study cities. There is a downside to this presentational strategy. From the reader's standpoint, judging the reliability of the many individual city/issues narratives is impossible. While it is true that all narratives are selective, narratives that can be cross-checked against a backdrop of generally available information are more persuasive. And oddly, although Sharp proposes that she is steering our attention away from the individual cities, she routinely characterizes her locales in this unqualified fashion: “unconventional Hill City,” “conventional Coastal City” (p. 41).

This bracketing of cities and culture, at times, seems curious. What is one to make of “conventional” Lake City, where various forms of sexually oriented business thrive, constituting an estimated $65 million niche in the local economy (p. 114)? Economic considerations may well affect policy, but is not the substance of this economy—thousands of customers, dozens of local entrepreneurs—also an aspect of the city's culture? One possibility could be that the conventional/unconventional culture spectrum needs to be reconsidered. One supposes—to use literary/cultural references as markers—that the presumed contrast places Dorian Gray (libertinism) at the far end of unconventionality, with Ward Cleaver (unflagging wholesomeness) at the conventional end. But what if conventionality runs to a terminus represented by Elmer Gantry (public rectitude joined to private backsliding)? The seeming contradiction between Lake City's ethos and political economy might thus be explained. But even if one chooses not to question the usefulness of scoring local cultures by means of a conventional/unconventional dichotomy, many passages in this study reveal troubling discordance between the quantitative preconception of local cultures and their observed, reported specifics. It is difficult not to conclude that once the 10 cities in this study were classified as conventional or unconventional, no body of additional evidence was going to yield a reconsideration of the original classification choices.

Elaine Sharp very ably demonstrates the significance of a variety of political conflict that, up to this point, has not received much attention from specialists in urban politics. She is less successful in offering a persuasive explanation of the subtle connections linking local demographic variations, the complex attitudinal cross-currents to be found within any city's population, and the public playing out of political mobilization and governmental action. In Morality Politics in American Cities, the conventions of political science sometimes war with the fundamentals of cogent political analysis.