Theorizing the Relationship between Morality and Authority: Contemporary Politics and Everyday Life

Sociology of morality has begun to move toward more focused analyses of how morality operates and is inculcated in multifarious social processes (Abend et al., 2025). A growing line of inquiry examines the relationship between morality and authority across domains.

This relationship has long been of sociological interest. Studies such as Milgram's (1974) were used to infer relationships between the morally disabling effects of authority at an interactional level with authoritarianism at the socio-political level. More recently, sociologists have approached issues like the link between authority and moral obedience (Hollander & Turowetz, 2023), how authoritarian political contexts inflect on moral decisions of teachers and civil servants (Geller, 2020; Shiff, 2026), the increasing use of moral and religious authority in contemporary authoritarian politics (Başer & Öztürk, 2017; Sider, 2020; Tepe & Chekirova, 2022), moral contestation of intellectual and scientific authority (Trotter, 2023), and the dynamics of authority within everyday relationships (Born & Vasbø, 2025).

Despite this growing body of work, there remains a lack of explicit theoretical engagement with how morality and authority are entwined. This gap limits our understanding of authority as a social mechanism and of how morality both shapes and is shaped by social asymmetries and hierarchies.

This panel invites contributions that theorise the interplay between morality and authority. We welcome papers that examine these dynamics through issues such as how morality is utilized in authoritarian politics, the use of moral argument to challenge authority, and how moral claims are mobilized to justify authority in diverse social spheres.