The Ethics Challenge in Public Service

A Problem-Solving Guide

Carol W. Lewis, Stuart C. Gilman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118228760
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of The Ethics Challenge in Public Service is the classic ethics text used in public management programs nationwide. It also serves as a valuable tool for public managers who work in a world that presents more ethical challenges every day. It contains a wealth of practical tools and strategies that public managers can use when making ethical choices in the ambiguous pressured world of public service. The book contains new material on topics including social networking, the use of apology, ethics as applied to public policy, working with elected officials, and more.

Part One

Ethical Duties of Public Managers

Chapter One

What Is Important in Public Service?

Examining ethics and the profession, Part One argues that ethics and genuine professional success go together in public service. It is the job itself—the ambiguous, complex, pressured world of public service—that presents special problems for people who are committed to doing the public's work and who want to do the right thing. Facing up to the ethical demands on public managers starts with biting the bullet: public service ethics is different from ethics in private life. The reason is that democracy is sustained by public trust—a link forged by stern ethical standards and expectations. This chapter concludes with a diagnostic exercise and a case study that highlight the contending values and cross-pressures in everyday judgment calls.

Public managers' identity and capacity for decision making and innovation are entangled in ethics, and rightly so, because public service is an instrument for managing our society's complexity and interdependency. The concern with ethics and demands on managerial responsibility extends beyond academic halls to government corridors, public interest groups, and professional associations. Much of the action in the past forty years—for example, the race by many jurisdictions and professional associations to adopt or tighten ethics codes—has translated into new challenges for public managers. Public expectations and formal standards today demand that managers undertake sophisticated ethical reasoning and apply rigorous ethical standards to decisions and behavior.

Why Me?

Ethical concerns target public managers for three main reasons. First, ethics is important in its own right. Second, having public power, authority, and accountability in a democracy in effect means that the public service's smooth functioning depends on trust

. The third reason is the widespread public perception that public service generally falls short of the higher standards of behavior that the public demands.

Need for Public Trust

If there is anything unique about public service, it begins with the idea that public service is a public trust. This idea can be traced back in the United States at least to colonial times and is the first item in the federal Principles of Ethical Conduct for Government Officers and Employees, first issued by executive order in 1989. It also can be identified at other times and in other cultures. More than a decade ago, for example, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2000a) declared, “Public service is a public trust… Fair and reliable public services inspire public trust.… Public service ethics are a prerequisite to, and underpin, public trust, and are a keystone of good governance.” A coalition of nonprofits and philanthropies, The Independent Sector (2004) agrees: “As a matter of fundamental principle, the nonprofit and philanthropic community should adhere to the highest ethical standards because it is the right thing to do. As a matter of pragmatic self-interest, the community should do so because public trust in our performance is the bedrock of our legitimacy.”

Public agencies rely on trust for the ability to govern effectively through voluntary compliance. Most citizens in democracies prefer compliance over compulsory obedience. All mainstream segments of the political spectrum in the United States share this preference. They assume that ethics, trust, and government power are linked. President Ronald Reagan affirmed his faith in this proposition in 1987 by declaring, “The power of the presidency is often thought to reside within this Oval Office, yet it doesn't rest here. It rests in you, the American people, and in your trust. Your trust is what gives a president his powers of leadership and his personal strength” (Reagan, 1987).

Broadly speaking, trust is defined as the expectation of right behavior. Different analysts add different shadings to what trust means in public service. For some, trust refers to the public's belief that activity in the public sector will promote shared values and interests and respond to public needs (Newell, Reeher, and Ronayne, 2008). In another version, “Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community” (Francis Fukuyama, quoted in Rheault, 2007). A third formulation takes a relational view founded on reciprocity and mutual interdependence: “Trust exists when one party to the relation believes the other party has incentive to act in his or her interest or to take his or her interests to heart” (Cook, Hardin, and Levi, 2005, p. 2). Notice that these different definitions all turn on belief, mutuality, and predictability.

Trust involves thinking, emotion, and behavior, and trust applies to relationships among and expectations about individuals and formal institutions. People's trust may not even always be directly tied to personal experience. A 2009 Gallup poll found that trust in one's neighbors varies with income, education, race, and age but not gender (Pelham and Crabtree, 2009).

Intensifying value conflicts contribute to the erosion, recognized years ago, that has been dubbed the confidence gap. This came to symbolize a pervasive erosion of trust and confidence in government and public institutions, paralleling attitudes toward all institutions (Lipset and Schneider, 1987). The public assessment is that perceived wrongdoing plagues society, from corporate corridors to city halls, from academia to the media, and from churches to popular charities. No segment is immune.

Public trust in government started its downturn in the early 1960s. Figure 1.1 shows that public trust continued its plunge through the 1970s and the events of Watergate. In August 1974 an incumbent president, Richard M. Nixon, resigned for the first time in American history. The negative spirit, which President Jimmy Carter dubbed “moral malaise,” continued. The celebrated turnaround in the early years of the Reagan administration was modest compared with the earlier, steep decline, and ultimately many high-level officials left the Reagan and following administrations under an ethics cloud. Every U.S. administration since Harry Truman has run, at least in part, on cleaning up the ethics mess of its predecessor.

Figure 1.1 Public Trust in Government, 1958–2010

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 2010a, p. 17. Reprinted by permission of the Pew Research Center. All rights reserved

Note: From 1976 to 2010, the trend line represents a three-survey moving average with individual data points shown

Shrill partisanship, divided government, widely held beliefs about corruption and the triumph of special interests, and increasing complexity and risk, coupled with perceptions of deceasing governmental capacity, have all played a part in diminishing trust over the past several decades. The part that individuals' widely publicized fancies and foibles played is less clear.

Trust in government declines during economic downturns and climbs during economic growth. Perhaps this explains why the impeachment of President Bill Clinton did not jolt the general direction of the trend shown in Figure 1.1. Public trust seems to be related to general optimism. The Pew Research Center conducted major studies of public opinion and trust (or, more accurately, distrust) of government in 1997–1998 and 2010. Its conclusion is that “there is no single factor that drives general public distrust in government… There is considerable evidence that distrust of government is strongly connected to how people feel about the overall state of the nation” (Pew, 1998, 2010a).

The decline of public trust, coupled with scandal in places high and low, catapulted ethics onto the national political stage but not to center stage. Public and media attention to ethics tends to be scandal driven and short-lived. National Gallup polls have long asked, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” From April 1990 on, usually less than 10 percent of respondents answered with some variant of an ethical issue. Given the circumstances surrounding presidential impeachment, it is not surprising that responses peaked in excess of 15 percent in 1998 and then returned to their usual level. More recent responses ranged from a high of 6 percent in March 2006 to a low of 3 percent in March 2011. Similarly, the Harris polls for 1997 to 2010 show that ethics, integrity, and values are on the front burner for very few citizens. These data suggest that when the noise of scandal subsides, our attention turns to business as usual, meaning concerns such as jobs, prices, and national security.

Although government in the abstract generally is mistrusted by the American public, a trust deficit does not necessarily describe all U.S. governments. Although Americans expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in their state governments fell to a low of 51 percent in 2009 (down from 67 percent for 2004 to 2008), this low still represents a majority (Jones, 2009a). Trust in local government remains stable, with about 70 percent of respondents to Gallup polls admitting to some level of trust since the beginning of this century. Pew surveys (2010a) find a rise in the percentage of people saying that all levels of government have a negative effect on their daily lives. Federal and state governments' positive ratings fell below majority levels over the years from 1997 to 2010. A declining majority (64 percent in 1997 versus 51 percent in 2010) sees local government's impact as positive. The fact that most ethical fouls in the United States occur at the local level is simply a matter of arithmetic: most governments, officials, and employees are local.

We tone down our response to polls and headlines by allowing for the political mileage gained by moaning about moral decay. It is a favorite pastime. Usually only a minority of Americans are content with the moral and ethical climate in the country and the great majority is dissatisfied (rating as “poor” or “only fair”) on Gallup's polls from 2002 to 2011

.

Yet one must admit that the overall level of trust in government nationwide suggests that citizens believe that much has gone wrong.

Global Glance

Governments and other authoritative institutions around the globe also face a confidence gap. A 2008 survey in nineteen nations with 59 percent of the world's population (World Public Opinion, 2008) found that

most publics expressed low levels of trust in their government to do what is right and this low trust appears to be related to the perception that governments are not being responsive to the will of the people… Interestingly, publics rated their governments as poor in all of the western democracies. Majorities say they trust their government only some of the time or never in Britain (67 percent), France (64 percent), and the United States (60 percent).

The United Nations issued its Vienna Declaration on Building Trust in Government in 2007. Its preamble states, “Today, building trust in government is a worldwide concern. When people do not see themselves and their interests represented by their political leaders and their government, trust is compromised and the general public interest is undermined.”

Honesty, Integrity, and Competence

The public regularly gives poor marks to elected political leaders in general on ethical dimensions such as honesty and integrity. Career public servants probably are painted with the same brush. There simply are not enough hard data to separate confidently the public's assessments of elected officials from ratings of pu...