Conflicts of Values and Political Forgiveness

Citizens' Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting

“…The extent of politicians’ obligation or duty to prevent failure—for example, by moral or legal codes or social norms—further sets the context for blame. Complex and conflicting values and obligations may also affect citizens’ perceptions of blame of politicians and could represent grounds for political forgiveness (see Nieuwenburg ), which would reduce blame.…”

A Conceptual Model for Individual Coping with Value Conflicts

“…Second, the model provides two reasons for why individuals may not experience a conflict: a) the values are commensurable (arrow 10, figure 1) and there is no reason that both values could not be simultaneously realized (arrow 11, figure 1) or b) the individual shows neglect for the value conflict (arrow 12, figure 1). With regard to neglect, Nieuwenburg (2014) argues that experiencing value conflicts benefits service delivery since the resulting awareness of conflicting constraints guarantees that all values are accounted for by decision-making procedures. When actors are neglecting a conflict because of strategic ignorance, whereby individuals avoid and reduce cognitive dissonance to avoid mental discomfort (Carrillo and Mariotti 2000), they risk losing sight of certain values which leads to or perhaps even already indicates public values failure (arrow 13, figure 1).…”

The 2016 John Gaus Lecture: The New Guerrilla Government: Are Big Data, Hyper Social Media and Contracting Out Changing the Ethics of Dissent?

“…Ethics is the study of values and how to define right and wrong action (Cooper 2001; 2012; Menzel 1999; Van Wart 1996). Scholars have analyzed personal ethics (Bowman and Wall 1997; Nieuwenburg 2014; Lavena 2016), organizational ethics (Zajac and Comfort 1997; Van Der Wal 2011; Andersen and Jakobsen 2016); professional ethics (Cooper 2004; Christensen and Laegreid 2011; Fattah 2011; Menzel 2015; Peffer 2015; Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016; Weimer and Vining 2016), regime values (Rohr 1988; Piotrowski 2014); and public service ethics (Bowman and Wall 1997; Brewer and Selden 1998; King, Chilton, and Roberts 2010; Dur and Zoutenbier 2014; Caillier 2015; Stazyk and Davis 2015; Wright, Hassan, and Park 2016).…”