Elite Perspectives on the Normativity of Election Campaigns: Empirical Political Theory and Adversarial Ethics

Political actors are often construed as rational utility maximisers operating under conditions of greater or lesser uncertainty. The role of norms in their decision-making is typically reduced to a rational calculation concerning the kind of sanctions or rewards that may come from actions that respectively breach or abide by breach a given norm. In the electoral context, this account of political action is especially influential. In many respects, the election campaign is a simplified political context where strategic thinking – to win “the horse race” – take centre-stage. Not only is there a clear and singular good to be maximised (vote share), uncertainty for the purposes of strategic planning is mitigated by the standardisation of the tools, strategies and messaging that have been gamed out in the field over decades. At the same time, election campaigns are rife with normative jeopardies concerning what exactly one is willing to do, go along with, or allow to happen, in order to win. These normative jeopardies become all the more intense in contexts where opponents are willing to engage in unscrupulous practices for electoral advantage, or when the stakes of losing an election are especially significant due to high levels of (affective) polarisation. While scholars readily integrate the reward-sanction dimension of social norms into the rational calculus of electoral actors, the role that individual moral agency plays in confronting these normative jeopardies is virtually absent from our understanding of political action in election campaigns. In this paper, we do not wish to dispute the role that rational calculation or social norms play in electioneering. Instead, we seek to draw attention to the numerous and sometimes surprising ways in which electoral actors seek to navigate the normativity of election campaigns in ways that go beyond strategic calculation or responsiveness to sanction. Our analysis is based on findings from interviews with 170 candidates and political professionals in four countries (Germany, Italy, the UK and the US) concerning their respective electoral experiences. We find that there are various ways in which electoral actors seek to “cope” with the normativity of elections. While some forms of moral coping may reduce and help resolve normative conflicts in a way that maintains personal integrity and even contributes to the maintenance of democratic standards, others types of moral coping may facilitate the erosion of democratic standards. Rooting ourselves in the tradition of empirical political theory, we seek to use our data to build a theory of moral coping in election campaigns – and adversarial contexts more broadly – that will give us a deeper understanding of the role that individual moral agency plays in contexts where it is often presumed to be absent, irrelevant, or tertiary at best.