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Making Marriage Promotion into Public Policy: The Epistemic Culture of a Statewide Initiative

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Abstract

Though political sociologists have sought to understand how self-interest influences politics and policymaking, little research has examined the mechanisms involved in the relationship between constructing knowledge and forming policy. This article extends the concept of epistemic culture to the field of policymaking to uncover the mechanisms of knowledge production in policy formation. It offers an extended case study of government marriage promotion policies that seek to fund and disseminate marriage education among poor couples with the goal of lifting them out of poverty. Based on an ethnography of a statewide marriage initiative in Oklahoma, this article maps out the parameters of an epistemic culture of marriage promotion shaped by three mechanisms: 1) The articulation of connections between policy, commonsense ideas, and extant epistemologies; 2) The formation of policy that consolidates research findings to quell controversy; and 3) The creation of networks to convince relevant actors of the importance of marriage promotion policy.

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Notes

  1. The final Smart Marriages Conference took place in 2010. The new annual NARME Conference, which brings together many of the same speakers and interested groups as the Smart Marriages Conference, is organized by the National Association for Relationship and Marriage Education.

  2. The Oklahoma Marriage Covenant. n.d. Retrieved July 25, 2011. (http://www.okmarriage.org/downloads/images/oklahoma marriage covenant2.doc).

  3. Covenant Marriage. n.d. Retrieved July 1, 2011 (www.covenantmarriage.com).

  4. Although introduced on a number of occasions, the covenant marriage bill has never passed.

  5. Family Research Council (FRC): http://www.frc.org/about-frc. In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center named FRC as one of 13 organizations considered a hate group based on their “propagation of known falsehoods—claims about [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people.” In response, FRC published an ad in the print editions of the Washington Examiner and Politico that was co-signed by 22 members of Congress (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-adds-family-research-council-to-hate-groups-list).

  6. Dan Quayle’s speech was delivered May 19, 1992 at the Commonwealth Club of California. http://www.vicepresidentdanquayle.com/speeches_StandingFirm_CCC_1.html. Accessed 1 November 2012.

  7. In Coming Apart, Murray largely abandons the term “underclass.”

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank to Neil McLaughlin for his helpful comments on this article. Thanks also to editor David Smilde and to three anonymous reviewers for their time and input. The research this article draws on was funded by a dissertation grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.

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  1. Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, L8S4M4, Canada

    Melanie Heath

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Correspondence to Melanie Heath.

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Heath, M. Making Marriage Promotion into Public Policy: The Epistemic Culture of a Statewide Initiative. Qual Sociol 35, 385–406 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-012-9236-2

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