When Political Ethics Meets Political Practice: Dilemmas, Virtues & Vices in the Swedish Parliament

Abstract

In this dissertation, I offer a novel perspective on what happens when political ethics meets political practice by exploring how Swedish parliamentarians reason about ethical dilemmas related to transparency, honesty, and compromise. Additionally, I study what parliamentarians consider to be the most challenging ethical dilemmas, the most important virtues, and the most problematic vices. Drawing on 74 in-depth scenariobased interviews and using a multi-stage analytical framework, I empirically show how several under-theorized aspects of political dilemmas are critical to how parliamentarians’ reason about everyday political dilemmas. Transparency, often seen as a cornerstone of democratic accountability in the literature, is considered by parliamentarians in relation to how it affects their political independence, appearance, and judgment. Honesty, a virtue often mentioned by parliamentarians, is, I argue, more about avoiding lying than always speaking about everything that is true. Compromising, generally viewed favorably in the literature, was in practice challenged by the difficulties in upholding and properly communicating the theoretically crucial difference between making a compromise and finding consensus. In the chapters on virtues and vices, I show how a multi-theme and multilevel perspective illuminates the role of virtues and vices in politics overall and their influence on how parliamentarians reason about dilemmas. Theoretically, a key contribution lies in the introduction of powerlessness as a central aspect for understanding what political dilemmas are, who faces them, and how they are handled. Moreover, by synthesizing the results from the empirical chapters with previous literature, I show how three additional analytical categories are critical for understanding how politicians reason when they face political dilemmas: the ethical sphere in which the dilemma occurs, the optics of the action taken, and how they have demarcated their responsibility. These results inform the literature on political dilemmas, particularly those in the ‘dirty hands’ genre, by underlining previously under-theorized aspects of political dilemmas. The dissertation also makes a methodological contribution by introducing an empirical method that future studies can use to operationalize, explore, and analyze political dilemmas.