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).
Misattributed Conflict — Case Studies
The following scenarios are fictional composites, built to illustrate common patterns of misattributed conflict in municipal government. Any resemblance to a specific city or official is coincidental; these are meant as teaching examples, not accounts of real events.
Case Study 1: The City Manager Who Took the Fall
Visible conflict: Residents of Maple Hollow packed council meetings for three months, furious at City Manager Dana Ruiz over a botched rollout of a new trash and recycling contract — missed pickups, billing errors, and a hotline that no one answered.
Actual source: Six months earlier, the council had split 3–2 on which vendor to select, with the losing faction insisting the winning bid was underfunded to hit its service targets. Rather than resolving the disagreement, the council directed staff to “implement the contract as awarded” without settling the underlying dispute about adequacy of funding. Ruiz’s staff was executing a plan built on a compromise the council itself had never actually reached.
Why it was misattributed: The public saw an administrative failure. The actual failure was a council decision that papered over an unresolved 3–2 split instead of resolving it before implementation.
What good conflict management would have looked like: A council member publicly stating, “This failure traces back to a decision we made without adequate funding — that’s on us, not administration,” redirects accountability to where it belongs and signals diagnostic honesty to residents.
Case Study 2: The Developer Everyone Loved to Hate
Visible conflict: In Ashford Township, a proposed 200-unit apartment complex drew furious opposition from the Elm Street Neighborhood Association, who accused the developer, Bridgewater Partners, of “ignoring community character” and “prioritizing profit over people.”
Actual source: The parcel had been zoned for multi-family residential use eleven years earlier, under a prior council seeking to meet state affordable-housing targets. No subsequent council had revisited that zoning designation despite years of neighborhood requests. Bridgewater was building exactly what the code allowed — the community’s real, legitimate grievance was that the zoning code no longer reflected the neighborhood’s preferences, and no elected body had ever addressed that mismatch.
Why it was misattributed: The developer was the visible, blame-able actor. The actual unresolved conflict was between the neighborhood and a zoning ordinance the council had left untouched for over a decade.
What good conflict management would have looked like: Council leadership acknowledging early in the process that this was fundamentally a zoning-policy conflict, and committing to a public rezoning review, rather than letting the developer absorb the political heat for a decision the council itself was responsible for revisiting.
Case Study 3: The Feud That Wasn’t Personal
Visible conflict: Council members Patricia Nkemelu and Grant Ostrowski developed a reputation for tense exchanges at nearly every meeting, prompting local coverage of a “council in disarray” and speculation about a personal rivalry.
Actual source: Nkemelu chaired the Public Works committee; Ostrowski chaired Planning. The two departments had overlapping authority over a stormwater infrastructure project, and neither department’s staff had ever formally clarified which had final sign-off authority. Every project update triggered a fresh jurisdictional dispute, which played out publicly through the two council members who oversaw those departments.
Why it was misattributed: The conflict was read as interpersonal. It was structural — an unresolved question of institutional authority that had never been settled at the staff or charter level.
What good conflict management would have looked like: Recognizing the pattern and referring the jurisdictional question to the city attorney or charter review for a clear resolution, rather than letting it replay indefinitely through two elected officials who had, by most accounts, no actual personal grievance with each other.
Case Study 4: Blamed for a Bill the City Didn’t Write
Visible conflict: Riverside Commons residents were outraged when new water-use restrictions took effect, blaming the council for “punishing” homeowners during a dry summer.
Actual source: The restrictions were mandated by a state drought-management statute triggered automatically once regional reservoir levels crossed a threshold. The council had no discretion in whether to impose them — only limited discretion in how enforcement was structured locally.
Why it was misattributed: The council was the visible, local, reachable target. The actual decision-maker was a state agency operating under statutory triggers residents were largely unaware of.
What good conflict management would have looked like: Proactively communicating the statutory trigger before backlash built, and clearly distinguishing “decisions we made” from “requirements we’re implementing” — a distinction that, left unmade, guarantees the council absorbs blame for choices it didn’t make.
A Note for Site Visitors
In each case, the emotion behind the conflict was genuine — residents weren’t wrong to be upset. What varied was whether local leadership correctly identified where the causal responsibility actually sat before responding. Councils that misdiagnose these situations tend to either over-apologize for things outside their control, or under-acknowledge things that were genuinely their responsibility. Both responses erode public trust in different ways.
When rating a council’s image on this dimension, consider asking: Did leadership correctly locate the source of this conflict, or did they let the most visible party absorb the blame?