New Directions in the Study of Administrative Corruption

Abstract

Administrative corruption was long a neglected area of research in American public administration. This neglect was due primarily to the axiomatic belief of earlier scholars that American public administration was inherently moral. Given the scientific origin of the discipline of public administration, and given Woodrow Wilson's division of politics and administration, this is not surprising. But developments after the Second World War not only made Wilson's dichotomy obsolete, but also led to new ethical dilemmas. Nevertheless, while dealing with these dilemmas,' the discipline of public administration continued with its a priori premise that public administrators remained philosopherkings. 2 During the 1960s, the ethos of public administration was affected by the advent of policy analysis and by the developmental and structural-functional approaches in political science. These approaches were responsible, as will be demonstrated, for the existing gap between corruption in American social institutions and scientific knowledge about the various causes of, and remedies for, corruption. Mark Lilla commented in his essay on the ethics of policy analysis: