A large number of pundits have placed the blame squarely upon the prime minister. Stephen Harper stands accused of having cultivated a take-no-prisoners, anything-goes culture in the Conservative party, which has given everyone in the party tacit licence to lie and cheat and swindle their way to victory. Others blame the very existence of political parties: Writing about the robocalls last week, Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne asserted that the robocalls "scandal may be the symptom, but partisanship is the disease."
And yet deep down, most of us know that whatever laws are found to have been broken, it was small beer compared to what goes on elsewhere. You want a sham democracy? Look at what just happened in Russia. You want dirty tricks? Misdirecting and underhanded robocalls are the meat and mead of American political life these days. In fact, given the extent to which our entire electoral apparatus relies on trust and a great deal of voluntary compliance, the real question we should be asking is not why did the robocalls scandal occur, but why it did not occur everywhere. That is, the issue isn't why did some people try to cheat in the last election, but rather, why did so many play by the rules?
To get some sort of handle on an answer, it helps to look at some of the literature on whitecollar crime. Like political dirty tricks, white-collar crime is a form of deviance from commonly accepted legal or ethical standards. But what sort of deviance is it? Most people subscribe to one of a handful of "folk" theories of white collar crime: the criminals have a defective character of some sort, or they are greedier than most people, or they have a different set of values from the rest of society.
Yet popular as these sorts of explanations are, most serious criminologists reject them. What is striking about most white-collar criminals is how "normal" they are. In many cases, greed doesn't help explain their behaviour, because often their actions only serve to enrich shareholders or other members of the corporation, not (just) themselves. And finally, study after study shows that the vast majority of criminals, from the most hardbitten juvenile delinquents up to the most overprivileged corporate thief, do not reject the values and norms of mainstream society, but accept them wholeheartedly.
So what does motivate whitecollar crime? According to experts, what is most striking is the way criminals excuse their behaviour by engaging in various rationalizations. And so it is common to see white-collar criminals suggest that no one was really harmed by their actions. Or they appeal to higher loyalties, such as their obligations to the firm. Or they appeal to necessity, either because the competition was doing it too, or because it was a legitimate response in what had turned into a tit-for-tat race to the bottom. As a result of these rationalizations, it is very common to see many accused declare that while they may indeed have broken the law, they are not, in fact, criminals.
A lot of this translates nicely to the realm of political dirty tricks. Take the example of Adam Carroll, the Liberal staffer who was behind the "Vikileaks" Twitter campaign that broadcast sordid personal details about Conservative minister Vic Toews. By all accounts Carroll is a great guy - even after he was outed, it was hard to find anyone on any side of the political fence in Ottawa who had a bad thing to say about him. But according to Liberal leader Bob Rae, Carroll was upset by Toews' early claim that anyone who did not support his lawful access bill was siding with child pornographers.
Taking Rae's explanation at face value, there are at least three rationalizations at work here: The denial of a victim (Toews had it coming), the implicit appeal to a higher loyalty (the Liberal party), and the tit-for-tat recourse to competitive necessity. But note that at no point do we need to assume that Adam Carroll has bad values, has a bad character, or was driven by raw self-interest. And whenever the architect of the voter-suppression robocalls is caught, it is almost certain that he, too, will be found to be a nice fellow who was motivated by a sense of higher purpose and a belief that it was a justified response to whatever it was the other side was doing.
In one sense, this is a bit distressing, since it suggests that otherwise decent people are able to convince themselves that highly immoral behaviour is justified in a given context. But that's not new - it merely reasserts the lessons of Stanley Milgram's experiments with electroshock, or the infamous Stanford prison experiment.
But there is a bright side to this, which is that it shows that context matters far more than character to political ethics. Our politicians are not bad people, but they sometimes find themselves in situations where they can rationalize behaving badly. What this means is that if we want people to behave ethically, all we have to do is design our institutions in a way that rewards good behaviour and limits the potential for rationalizations of deviance.
Does that sound impossible? It isn't. Remember, far more people played fairly in the last election than played dirty, despite ample opportunity and excuses to do otherwise. The fact that they did so suggests that our political institutions are already pretty well designed, the hysterias of the pundits notwithstanding.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Andrew Potter
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