Judging by Appearances: Professional Ethics, Expressive Government, and the Moral Significance of How Things Seem (original) (raw)

Ethics in politics

Applied Ethics: Strengthening Ethical Practices, 2012

The topic ‘ethics in politics’ might cover a multitude of sins. Here it will be restricted to the ethics of politicians in representative liberal democracies. The ethics of public servants will be left aside, as will be the ethics of politicians in other political systems. Plain criminal wrongdoing by politicians will also be outside our scope. The subject is still very large. It includes all those matters that reflect on a politician’s ethical reputation. Political wrongdoing can range in magnitude from taking a country to war on inadequate grounds to fiddling with one’s parliamentary expenses.

Keeping them Honest: Public and Elite Perceptions of Ethical Conduct among Australian Legislators

Political Studies, 2000

Public confidence in politicians across all democratic countries has fallen to historic lows in recent years. In Australia, around one in three voters believe that legislators use their public office for financial gain, and only one in four believe that legislators have a high moral code. Governments in many countries have attempted to deal with this problem by establishing codes of ethical conduct for legislators. This paper examines what standards citizens expect from their politicians and, in turn, what standards politicians themselves regard as important. The data come from the 1996 Australian Election Study survey which asked voters and elected representatives what importance they attributed to the eight principles laid out in the federal parliament's own ethical guide. The results show that voters expect higher standards from legislators than do legislators themselves, particularly with regard to the proper use of public resources and rejecting favouritism. A range of hypo...

Legislative Ethics and Codes of Conduct

The purpose of this paper is to discuss why and how ethics reforms have been enacted by many parliaments in the course of the past decade. Our argument is fairly straightforward. Politicians' perceived irresponsiveness, various forms of misconduct and corruption scandals have eroded voters' trust in politicians and political institutions. In order to induce a more ethical behavior among politicians as well as to rebuild public trust in political institutions, ethics regimes have been adopted by several legislatures. Such regimes have generally taken two main forms: ethics codes and conduct codes. Ethics codes tend to be fairly general documents: they formulate broad principles of behavior but they do not define what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior, nor do they establish sanctions for violations of the code. By contrast, codes of conduct tend to contain very specific provisions with clear sanctions for those who violate the dispositions of the code. Terminological confusion arises, however, because some parliamentary ethics codes include dispositions and sanctions that are more commonly found in codes of conduct. This paper attempts to clear this terminological confusion, reviewing the dispositions and sanctions that may included in both ethics and conduct codes, with special attention to probable success factors. It underlines the importance of cultural factors, suggesting that one of the success factors is whether the individuals that the code is regulates actually share the same ethical standards, have a common understanding of what is appropriate behavior and a common understanding of what constitutes misconduct.

Beyond the code of conduct: Building ethical competence in public officials

U4 Brief, 2009

Can Codes of Conduct set realistic ethical standards for officials? Can training in ethics and professional standards make any practical difference in the way public officials behave? Can the notions of 'ethical competence' and 'ethical reliability' help to identify new ways of thinking about ethical performance on the part of public officials? These and related questions have been the subject of widespread research over the past two decades. Even so, in seeking to establish ethical standards and norms of professionalism, most public sector agencies today have scarcely advanced beyond the mechanism of the traditional rule-based Code of Conduct, often based on the 'core values' of the institution. Such rule-based Codes of Conduct generally aim to prohibit corruption and misconduct, rather than promoting ethical conduct in the exercise of public functions. This U4 Brief outlines the main issues behind these concerns, looks beyond to some of the reasons why traditional methods of managing ethical problems encountered by public officials often fail, and examines how this important deficit might be remedied.

Integrity in democratic politics

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

The complaint that many professional politicians lack integrity is common. However, it is unclear what such a judgement amounts to. Taking various codes of political ethics in the United Kingdom as my starting point, I examine the extent to which we can understand political integrity as a matter of politicians adhering to the obligations that official codes of ethics prescribe and, in a more general sense, the public-service ethos that underpins these codes. I argue that although this way of approaching the issue usefully draws our attention to an important class of positional duties that apply to politicians, commitment to principled political causes plays a further, indispensable role in coherent assessments of political integrity. In consequence, I claim that politicians of integrity succeed in furthering their deepest political commitments while avoiding malfeasance or misconduct. As such, the ascription of political integrity can often only be made when assessing a long train of action.

Ethical Political Conduct and Fidelity to the Democratic Ethos

Research in Public Policy Analysis and Management

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 article, 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.