A Distinct Public Administration Ethics?

Abstract

The public administration literature enumerates many values of attributes desirable in civil servants, and it proposes at least two paradigms or frameworks—a bureaucratic ethos and a democratic ethos—associated with such values. The writings also suggest the existence of a public administration ethic. The broader professional ethics literature has similarly posited that each profession has an ethics or morality of its own; in fact, the separatist thesis holds that such an acquired ethics is role-based and may take precedence over ordinary citizen ethics. This article reports the results of empirical research into a public administration ethic, by testing the importance of twelve public administration values among bureaucrats, elected officials, and voters.