The Political Privacy Dilemma: Private Lives and Public Office

Should political leaders have a right to privacy? Incursions by new and traditional media into the private lives of political leaders are commonplace. Are such incursions ethically justifiable? Prima facie, the question of ‘political privacy’ seems to involve a conflict between a politician's self-interest in retaining a protected private realm and citizens' public interest in having access to information about their representative's private life. Indeed, this is the structure that the debate has typically assumed. I challenge this orthodox view by demonstrating that there is a public interest in political privacy grounded in the relationship between privacy and political judgement. I argue that the political privacy debate should be recast to recognise this conflict between two different strands of the public interest. This conflict presents a dilemma for democratic theory: in providing voters with private information relevant to the evaluation of political leaders' suitability for office and performance within it, we threaten to undermine the conditions necessary to attract candidates of judgement and for political leaders to judge well once in office.