Ethics Matter: The Morality and Justice Principles of Elected City Officials and Their Impact on Urban Issues

ABSTRACT:

This article pursues the thesis that ethics matter in urban policymaking. Interviews with 95 elected officials in 12 cities revealed the officials’ support for—and opposition to—many principles of political morality and political justice. Officials regarded their ethical principles as almost as important as economic constraints on their policy decisions, and much more important than political, legal, jurisdictional, and cultural considerations. The role of ethics in the resolution of 93 issues that arose in their communities varied from minimal to decisive. On some occasions ethical considerations served mainly as justifications for policy decisions made primarily on other grounds. But more often, significant numbers of officials drew largely, and even primarily, on their own moral judgments when casting their votes on community issues. And some policies were driven by consensual moral understandings.

Notes

1 A growing body of psychological and evolutionary research points to the role of normative evaluations in human behavior generally. In his summary of some of this research, Brooks (2011, p. 21) notes that “Emotion assigns values to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of these valuations.”

2 Judd (2005) discusses the concern that in urban research, “scholarship, advocacy, and ideology have become hopelessly entangled.”

3 This conception parallels a rigorous conception of power: that getting what one wants is not sufficient to say one has power; to have power, one must get what one wants in the face of opposition.

4 The assumption that people have autonomously derived desires to be treated as independent variables has been strongly contested in a wide range of political theory, including that of Bachrach and Baratz (1962), Lukes (1974, pp. 21–25), and Sandel (1984).

5 An interesting question for urban analysis concerns the possible differential constraints imposed by local, national, and global markets. Many officials and scholars believe that expanding global markets enhance constraints on local officials. While this belief is certainly plausible, some research (such as that by Savitch and Kantor, 2002) suggests caution about overgeneralizing in this regard.

6 Ethical pluralism has given rise to a new generation of (reconstructed) pluralist political theory, as expressed in the work of Walzer (1983), Rawls (1993), Eisenberg (1995), Kekes (2000), Galston (2004), Connolly (2005), and Schlosberg (2006).

7 There is, of course, a vast literature making this point, ranging from Schumpeter’s (1942, pp. 250–255) skepticism of citizen’s ability to reach agreement on the contents of the common good to Sandel’s (1996, pp. 318–321) insistence on the desirability of seeing its contents as contestable.

8 We do not insist that political morality and political justice are the only ethical considerations that officials may consider. For example, as we shall discuss at the beginning of section 4, they may be concerned with how political decisions affect citizenship. Our concern is not to provide an exhaustive set of normative principles, but only to examine a significant set of such principles.

9 Most officials included in our data set were from a particular council within our sample cities. However, a few persons who had served on a previous council were also interviewed when they were identified as playing key roles in the concrete issues under investigation. Most interviews within particular cities were conducted within a 3–6 month period when officials were not subject to electoral pressures. Among the factors contributing to extended time period for completing the data collection were: (a) the need to accommodate officials’ busy schedules in setting up the two-stage interviews, (b) the need to complement the interviews with other contextual research, and (c) the need to await the resolution of certain issues that had arisen but remained unresolved, even after interviews were completed. In such circumstances, call-back telephone interviews were sometimes used.

10 When this happened, we tried to listen to their principles and note how these principles departed from those we presented, but in the end we tried to get as much consistency as possible across officials. This was done by discussing various meanings and applications of these principles, and then prompting officials to indicate their degree of support for a common set of moral meanings that the principles were intended to express.

11 Many officials were well aware of the argument associated with Peterson (1981) that local communities are poorly positioned in the federal system to provide welfare.

12 Of course, some concrete issues are difficult to classify using this typology, as much politics occur over such labeling (Riker, 1986). For example, living-wage ordinances can be seen as policies to provide public assistance to low-income families, as economic regulations, and as (usually adverse) economic development policies. Nevertheless, our classification of concrete issues is not arbitrary but reflects the judgments of the officials themselves. The issues identified for study were based on officials providing their views of the most important public provision, economic development, public assistance, economic regulation, and social regulation policies that arose recently in their communities. They also identified, and we also studied, a few additional issues—mostly about procedural and personnel matters—that did not fit well into one of these domains, but these issues are ignored in this paper.

13 The unequal number of cases across domains in Table 5 is due to our usually considering two issues involving public provision, economic development, and public assistance in each city, but only one case of economic regulation and social regulation in each city. Also, some officials did not participate in selected issues that were largely resolved prior to their assuming office.

14 Discussion of the differential importance of other considerations across policy domains would take us outside the focus of this paper, but readers might find interesting such findings as public preferences being most important on issues of social regulation and least important on issues of public assistance.

15 To classify issues by the degree to which ethics mattered in their resolution, we averaged the assessments of all participating officials on each issue, yielding an overall “ethics matter” score for each issue. If an issue had an average score of less than 1.5, the majority thought ethics were at best minor considerations, and reviewing these cases provided little reason for suggesting that ethical considerations affected the outcome. Subsequent determinations about issues where ethics mattered more were made in the same manner. Since some researcher judgment goes into these assessments, we are uncomfortable reporting precise estimates of the percentage of issues that fall into various categories and instead use more general language.

16 Among the many works that could be cited about the problematic nature of moralistic politics are those of Bennett and Shapiro (2002) and Wolfe (2006, pp. 4–7).