Partisan Morality

11 Jun

Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil have said that activists posed as members of a polling company and went door-to-door to canvass the opinions of voters.

https://amp.rte.ie/amp/1227134/

The rationale is simple. If you pose as an SF worker, you are likely to be met with shut doors or opinions in favor of SF got under slight duress. Is it a bridge too far or is it a harmless lie? More generally, do we use the same moral reasoning paradigm for violations by co-partisans and opposing partisans? My hunch is that for such kinds of violations we use a deontological framework for opposing partisans and a consequentialist one for co-partisans. The framework we use may switch depending on the circumstance. One way to test it would be to do a survey experiment with the above news article, switching parties. To get a better baseline, it may be useful to do three conditions: party_a, party_b, consumer_brand, e.g., Coke, etc.