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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.

Theories of knowledge are critical to practical reasoning. Nevertheless, most students of management pay little or no attention to the disciplines that deal most directly with questions about knowledge, its origins, and its nature: epistemology primarily, but the philosophy of science and other related disciplines as well. Even where underlying philosophical assumptions influence their thinking and writing, students of practical reasoning often fail to acknowledge these influences. That is a great pity. By looking to epistemology, a richer and more coherent development of practical reasoning and its contribution to administrative inquiry as a field of intellectual endeavor may be possible. Moreover, the relationship between our understanding of knowledge and our understanding of practical reasoning is potentially reciprocal. A fuller exploration of this relationship may help us better understand social epistemology as well as promote conceptual development in the fields of practical reasoning and administrative inquiry.

Concerns over the erosion of public trust have led British and Canadian parliamentarians to introduce some form of independent element in their arrangements for regulating political ethics, while legislators in the U.S. are refusing to make similar changes even if they also face severe problems of declining confidence in politics. To explain these differences, this chapter shows how ethics regulation processes are self-reinforcing over time, leading to more rules enforced through self-regulation mechanisms or to path-shifting changes where legislatures, hoping to break the ethics inflationary cycle, opt for a more depoliticized form of ethics regulation.

This chapter assesses the impact of ethics laws at the state level in the U.S., focusing on laws that apply specifically to one category of public officials: legislators. I first discuss the positive contribution of ethics laws to the functioning of democratic government. I then turn to the costs of the laws, which are often subtle and counterintuitive. The discussion of the costs of ethics laws draws on a growing body of empirical evidence, and highlights the ways that legislation can have unintended and undesirable consequences.

In an international context, public management arrangements differ significantly from country to country, and also regionally and locally. One reason for these differences may be different civic cultures with differing views of the state and its institutions. This may appear to be obvious, but it is highly important when public management reform models are proposed and transferred from one country to others such as was the case (and still is to some extent – especially from developed to developing nations) with, for example, the new public management. Scholars in public management, as well as international practitioners, should be aware of the impact culture has on the possibilities and limits of concept transfer between different organizations and jurisdictions.

Ethical conduct by politicians involves more than respect for the law and adherence to rules governing conflicts of interest. It displays fidelity to a democratic ethos. In this chapter, I provide a characterization of the democratic ethos and sketch its connection to recent work in democratic theory. Second, I describe the sort of fidelity to the democratic ethos that is a condition of ethical conduct by politicians. Third, I suggest a mechanism through which greater adherence to a suitable version of the democratic ethos might be achieved.

This chapter examines the range of possible effects of ethics laws enacted by state legislatures. One objective of ethics law, to reduce corruption, cannot be demonstrated. Other objectives, to placate the media, defend against partisan attack, and permit the legislature to move on, have mixed results, while a final objective, to restore public confidence, is not achieved. Nevertheless, ethics law does affect the process, by somewhat discouraging legislator recruitment and retention, by raising the consciousness of legislators, and by changing the cultures of state capitals.

The chapter is divided into two broad sections. The first addresses macro or global sources of ethics discontent. This will discuss concern about political ethics in the broad context of complex processes such as globalization, development, liberalization, and democratization. These are clearly huge subjects and there is no space to do justice to their complexities, but the aim here is to identify some key aspects, which have particularly important implications for increasing concern about political ethics. The second section is concerned with exploring the political aspects of public ethics through a consideration of political scandal, because scandals are often cited as the source of unease about ethical standards in public life and as the catalysts for institutional reform.