Introduction

Abstract

One of the strengths of this symposium is its focus. All of the articles in this volume concentrate on economically developed nations, with stable polities, traditions of popular government, legal systems grounded in common law, and relatively low levels of corruption. Moreover, they all deal with countries that to a greater or lesser degree have embraced the so-called New Public Management, which implies a degree of skepticism about the governance arrangements grounded in bureaucratic norms derived from the rechsstaat tradition. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they all deal with countries, which, as Denis Saint-Martin explains in his introductory essay, are increasingly distressed about the ethics of public officials despite a paucity of lapses on their part. This makes the case comparisons reported in the symposium especially telling: there is enough variance to be informative, not enough to overdetermine the findings. Consequently, what holds for one case may reasonably be presumed to apply to all.

Citation

Thompson, F. (2006), "Introduction", Saint-Martin, D. and Thompson, F. (Ed.) Public Ethics and Governance: Standards and Practices in Comparative Perspective (Research in Public Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0732-1317(05)14001-9