Moral Values and Local Poliitical Decision Making

• In Event: Federalism and Local Politics in the United States

Abstract

Decisions made by local elected officials have significant impact on citizens. Many decisions are routine and perhaps requite little thought on the part of officials who make them, and in that case may not directly engage personal and moral values. However, even local elected officials may find themselves making choices that have positive and negative impacts on members of their communities, and which may put those officials own moral and personal values at stake and in conflict. Thus, understanding the moral beliefs, moral character, and moral recognition of local officials and how they affect the decisions that get made is important, not just for their decision-making impact, but also because officials’ moral perspectives may differ from citizens’.

Local officials come from the public but are not randomly selected. Their decisions are often opaque given the relative lack of media coverage and information available to citizens compared to higher level politics.

Given this, and given the large number of local officials, it seems surprising how little we know about when and how moral values influence their decision making. This study focuses on whether and how local officials' moral values shape local policy decisions. We report on the first stages of a multi-methods project, using semi-structured interviews of local officials to identify typical policy decisions that engage moral dilemmas, providing insight into how local officials perceive moral dilemmas in their day-to-day decision making.

These interviews will be used in a second phase of the project to develop an online survey of local officials to gain a systematic understanding of how they respond to moral dilemmas and how their moral identities and beliefs matter in dealing with these dilemmas.

Authors

• David P. Redlawsk, University of Delaware

• Heon Lee, University of Delaware