The Influence of Moral Values on Decisions by Local Elected Officials

Decisions made by local elected officials have significant impact on citizens. Many decisions are routine, requiring little reflection by the officials who make them. Such decisions probably do not directly engage officials’ moral and personal values. Examples might be whether to award a contract for picking up trash in the community, or approve a street repaving project. However, local elected officials do make decisions that have disparate positive and negative impacts on members of their communities. Such decisions may put those officials’ own moral values at stake and in conflict. Addressing the question of affordable housing, for example, can pit those who need housing against others in the community who wish to protect what they perceive as the community's character. Local officials make these kinds of trade-offs regularly, and in doing so may rely at least in part on personal moral considerations. How local elected officials come by their moral understandings and under what conditions they apply a moral lens to their decision making are not well understood. Moreover, there may be times in which officials' own moral values conflict with their perceptions of the community's preferences. Thus, recognizing the wellsprings of local officials' moral values and their own beliefs about how such values are applied to the decisions they make is important to understanding local policy-making. This study focuses on whether and how U.S.-based local officials' moral values shape local policy decisions. We report on the first stages of a multi-methods project using surveys and elite semi-structured interviews designed to identify the typical policy decisions that create moral choices, and to provide insight into how local officials perceive moral choices in their day-to-day decision making. In particular, in this phase of the project we carry out a series of semi-structured interviews with local elected officials using snowball sampling. In those interviews, we interrogate the use of moral values, including assessing moral identity and foundations. We ask officials to describe their own beliefs about the role of moral values, and identify specific examples of decisions with moral impact. Finally, we also ask officials to introspect on their understanding of morality as it concerns their official decision making. With this project we anticipate gaining a better understanding of how local officials respond to moral choices and how their moral identities and beliefs matter in dealing with those choices.