Survey Category: Conflict and Conflict Management
Every city council governs through disagreement. Zoning disputes, budget trade-offs, competing constituent demands, and personality friction among elected officials are not signs of dysfunction — they are the normal material of local governance. What distinguishes a well-managed council from a poorly managed one is not the presence of conflict but how accurately it is understood and how skillfully it is handled.
That is why conflict and conflict management is the first of the six dimensions of political harmony we track on this site. A council’s public image is shaped less by whether disagreements occur than by whether residents believe those disagreements are being diagnosed correctly and addressed in good faith.
To evaluate that, we draw on one of the foundational frameworks in conflict theory: the work of social psychologist Morton Deutsch.
Who Was Morton Deutsch?
Morton Deutsch (1920–2017) was a social psychologist widely regarded as a founder of the modern academic study of conflict resolution. He spent much of his career at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where he founded the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. His central contribution was reframing conflict not as an event to be avoided, but as a structural relationship between parties that can be understood, categorized, and — in most cases — managed constructively.
Deutsch’s most enduring insight was that the outcome of a conflict depends heavily on whether the parties approach it with a cooperative or a competitive orientation. But before that orientation even comes into play, he argued, it helps to correctly identify what kind of conflict is actually occurring. Misdiagnosing the type of conflict is, in his view, one of the most common reasons well-intentioned efforts to resolve disputes fail.
Deutsch’s Typology of Conflict
Deutsch classified conflicts according to the relationship between the objective conditions underlying a dispute and the parties’ perception of those conditions. This produces six recognizable types:
1. Veridical Conflict The conflict is real, and both parties perceive it accurately. The disagreement exists because the parties’ interests, positions, or values genuinely diverge, and everyone understands this correctly. This is conflict in its most straightforward form.
2. Contingent Conflict The conflict depends on circumstances that could be changed, but the parties don’t realize this. If an available alternative or resource were recognized, the conflict would dissolve — yet because neither side sees the alternative, the dispute persists as if it were unavoidable.
3. Displaced Conflict The parties are arguing about the wrong issue. There is a real, underlying source of tension, but it gets expressed through a substitute or symbolic dispute rather than being addressed directly.
4. Misattributed Conflict The conflict is real, but it has been assigned to the wrong cause or the wrong party. The people arguing may not be the ones whose interests actually conflict, or the reason given for the dispute is not the reason it is actually happening.
5. Latent Conflict The conditions for conflict exist, but the conflict has not yet surfaced. No one has yet recognized or acted on the underlying tension.
6. False Conflict There is no objective basis for disagreement at all. The conflict exists purely because of misunderstanding, poor communication, or misperception, with no real divergence of interest underneath it.
Why This Matters for Evaluating Local Government
A city council that handles conflict well is not one that avoids disagreement — it’s one whose leadership can correctly identify which kind of conflict it is facing before attempting to resolve it. A council that treats a misattributed conflict as though it were veridical, for example, will spend political capital solving the wrong problem, and residents will accurately sense that the “resolution” didn’t actually resolve anything.
This is the diagnostic lens we’ll apply throughout this dimension of the site: not simply did conflict happen, but did leadership understand what kind of conflict it actually was, and did their response match it?
Next in this series: a closer look at misattributed conflict — how it shows up in municipal government, and what it looks like when a council gets the diagnosis right (or wrong).