Ethical Reasoning in a Time of Revolution: A Study of Local Officials in Poland

Abstract

Poland's transition from communism to democracy was marked by rhetoric that expressed democratic principles as the basis for organizing political life. Given the fundamentally moral message of the radical transformation throughout Eastern Europe, we would expect officials assuming office in these times to be strongly motivated by ethical principles as a basis for decision making. Arguably, office seekers would be idealists who believed that the principled rhetoric of the revolution could come to fruition in governmental actions. And this might be particularly true for elected officials who were obliged to organize beliefs based on principle into a political platform. Furthermore, we would expect the new decision makers in the initial stages to shun mindless deference to established rules, since their entire political context was marked by a rejection of established rules and the absence of a recent tradition that would provide a cultural framework for obedience to the law. In this context one might assume that only the former Communist Party officials who survived the transition in government would hold fast to the protection of the law as the basis for decision making in ambiguous moral situations. A focus group held with public administrators in Warsaw in the fall of 1990 reinforced these inferences. When we asked these officials to reflect on how they would handle an ethical dilemma in the workplace, we found that principled reasoning strongly outranked deference to law or rules as their preferred basis for decision making. This reinforced our assumption that if principled reasoning could ever guide public decision making, it would emerge strongly to guide those who assumed the mantle of public office in the new regime in Poland. With this set of expectations we undertook a study of the systems of moral reasoning which public officials in newly democratic Poland employed as they resolved ethical dilemmas in their work lives. Since most of our studies in the United States had focused on local officials, we held that focus in Poland. However, though our U.S. studies (Stewart and Sprinthall, 1994) included only appointed public administrators, the fluid political situation in Poland warranted including a comparison group of elected Polish local officials as well. The Background Though public administration literature is rich with analyses of codes (Chandler, 1983; Plant, 1994), climates (Bonczek, 1992; Bonczek and Menzel, 1994), and criminal sanctions (Doig, 1983; Doig, Phillips and Mason, 1984) as they relate to ethical decision making, research on individuals and their ethical choices in public office settings is not extensive. We do know much about how people generally reason in moral situations (Kohlberg, 1981; Rest, 1979, 1986) and that these reasoning patterns hold across cultures (Snarey, 1985). Working with Lawrence Kohlberg's stage model of moral maturity, we also know that there is a substantial degree of consistency between individual behavior and the moral judgment stage particularly at the more advanced levels (Blasi, 1980). Further, we know that the moral development research carried out in Poland since 1984 has confirmed the universal developmental trend toward principled reasoning determined by level of education and cognitive ability (Jasinska-Kania, 1988, 1989). In addition the research of Lind, Grocholweska, and Langer (1987) in Austria, West Germany, and Poland has further supported the cross-cultural validity of Kohlberg's moral development theory. However, only two empirical studies were relevant to a focus on public officials and their traits, beliefs, personal choices, and actions in relation to their ethical choices. Bowman (1990) has studied perceptions regarding ethics in society and government as well as overall organizational approaches to moral standards in a sample of 750 federal, state, and local officials who were members of ASPA in 1989. Stewart and Sprinthall have conducted studies of moral reasoning among North Carolina (1994) and Florida (1992) public administrators using an instrument built on the moral development theory of Lawrence Kohlberg. …