Clive Stevens

Doesn’t time fly when you are enjoying yourself! A new academic year – not that I noticed the join – Year 3, they say. For my PhD, I’ve completed six of a proposed 18 interviews with Local Government representatives (councillors) from all four political parties in Bristol. Focus groups are next year. The qualitative data is pouring in and I’m worrying how to cope with it all.

Fairness is clearly very subjective and even categorising it will be a step forward.

The theory I am relying on comes mainly from the field of Social Psychology, which draws its evidence from experiment and Social Anthropological ethnography. Add in philosophical works on Social Justice, a sprinkling of Schön and Rein’s framing and spiced up with biases of empathy, risk and power.

I have chosen councillors as I was one myself, which has proved useful in gaining access as well as for writing engaging vignettes. The three I use are based on Local Government case studies. They took a year to write and are pumped full of triggers, suggestions, biases and frames to see what and how many conceptions of fairness come into view.

The vignette content has been carefully reviewed by four experts (the Expert Panel) including an INLOGOV academic; their modifications were incorporated. The vignettes are driving the conversation, so much so that I don’t actually have to ask many questions!

The first one tempts councillors to break the usual rules for housing allocation by pushing the sympathy button ever so strongly; it looks at breaches where policy and procedures exist (Planning and Housing). The second vignette is placed in a sector with no policy and no procedure – a rare occurrence I know – and the final one tests adherence to policy almost to destruction. I can’t reveal the results, not until next year – sorry.

Thematic analysis (inductive and deductive) is picking up between 80 and 100 conceptions per interview fitting into 11 broad categories. Eight of these are different categories of fairness, or realms as I call them, each having an approach appropriate for certain circumstances. The other three are moral foundations of care, loyalty and liberty.

My current struggle is not the thematic analysis itself, but wondering whether I should investigate if there is any qualitative link between conceptions offered up by councillors compared with the suggestion, trigger or framing at that part of the vignette. For example, if a section of a vignette is supposed to prompt feelings of equality, then how to analyse a reply which ignores equality and concentrates on merit? Surely such occurrences are as significant (not statistically) than a comment discussing equality? Answers on a postcard please.

So where does this fit into Public Policy you may ask? Indeed, my supervisors ask that too. Clearly democratic legitimacy (moral rather than legal) relies to an extent on fairness of inputs and throughputs, and output effectiveness. I have heard, “What’s the point of democracy, if it doesn’t deliver fairness?” Additionally, the resolution of Wicked Problems and getting issues onto Political Agendas require understanding of differing moral values including conceptions of fairness. So, I would suggest, quite a lot really.

Moving briefly away from English Local Government to US Foreign Policy, I recently came across a 2022 paper on International Relations. The authors appeared to be lambasting their colleagues for focussing on just one conception of fairness: equality. Powers et al. the authors, used Social Psychology’s Moral Foundation Theory to explain why the American public and politicians think aspects of foreign policy like burden sharing for defence, peacekeeping, environmental clean ups and emergency response are unfair.

Their paper proposes the field introduce a second conception, proportionality, which they called equity. In the UK Social Sciences, we reserve equity to mean fairness based on need. Fairness conceived as proportionality would suggest, for example, that it might be seen as fairer for NATO countries to pay their way by putting in a similar percentage of GDP rather each country putting in what it can. I hope they succeed for all our sakes but I’m dreading the thought of having to tell them that there might be up to eight conceptions of fairness!

Back to Local Government and I’ll leave the last word with one of my councillor interviewees. I paraphrase, “You know Clive, we don’t really talk much about it, it’s rules and regulations, there’s comfort in them. These vignettes are very interesting to actually spend time thinking about fairness.”

As an ex-councillor in Bristol and author of the book on Local Government, After The Revolution, Clive needed to follow up on politicians’ conceptions of fairness. He is now in Year 3 of a PhD at the University of Bristol interviewing current councillors. His personal blog site is: https://sageandonion.substack.com/