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Principal Investigator: Professor Emanuela Ceva
Public institutional action in non-ideal circumstances may require public officeholders to deviate from compliance with institutional rules to get round institutional dysfunctions. This may occur when public officeholders struggle to ensure service delivery due to excessive bureaucracy, corruption, or emergencies such as health or security crises. Public officeholders might develop the conviction that the only way forward is to (ab)use the discretion that comes with their office to perform their functions. However, this apparent necessity can impose significant affective and moral burdens on officeholders and reveal a breakdown of their relations of mutual trust.
How should public officeholders handle those situations when the demands of institutional compliance conflict with those of addressing institutional dysfunctions?
The IDHEA project—Institutional Dirty-Hands Heuristic Approach (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation)—proposes to address this question by adopting a heuristic approach based on “dirty hands”.