Revisiting the Core of Our Good Government Ethos

• Date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12350
• Published date: 01 March 2015

186 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 186–187. © 2015 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12350.

Editorial

James L. Perry

Indiana University, Bloomington

Revisiting the Core of Our Good Government Ethos

D uring the last decade, I have been fortunate

to travel extensively outside North America.

I have been resident scholar at Katholieke

Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Yonsei University, South

Korea, and The University of Hong Kong, among

many other stops in my travels. As an American, I

carried a sense of superiority that our administrative

institutions were relatively corruption-free. My sense of

superiority was reinforced by comparative national cor-

ruption indices, which ranked the United States highly.

In the last couple of years, however, I have become less

smug about America ’ s freedom from corruption. My

smugness eroded gradually. One factor has been the

steady drumbeat of stories related to administrative

corruption appearing in the American press. These

stories seemed to touch every level of political and

administrative actor, from the selling of office by the

Governor of Virginia, to undue influence of lobbyists

on attorneys general, to resignations of city managers

and arrests of mayors in south Florida, to broad ethi-

cal and performance failures in the Secret Service.

Another contributor to my awakening about corruption

is “The Impact of Public Officials’ Corruption on the

Size and Allocation of U.S. State Spending,” by Cheol

Liu and John Mikesell, which appeared in the May/

June 2014 issue of Public Administration Review (PAR ) .

The conclusion of the article is sobering—that the most

corrupt (as measured by federal criminal convictions)

state governments in the United States may be costing

state taxpayers dearly. More revealing was the response

to the article from news outlets, social media, blogs,

and other media (see Altmetric measures at http://www.

altmetric.com/details.php?domain=onlinelibrary.wiley.

com&citation_id=2309731 ), which drew attention of a

mass audience, not only in the United States but glob-

ally, too. The response to the article reflects that profes-

sionals and citizens care deeply about the integrity of

their institutions.

The most recent evidence to erode my smugness is

Zephyr Teachout ’ s ( 2014 ), Corruption in America:

From Benjamin Franklin ’ s Snuff Box to Citizens United .

Teachout, Professor of Law at Fordham University,

offers a sweeping historical perspective about cor-

ruption in America. Her thesis mirrors my growing

discomfort with America ’ s status as a pillar against

corruption. She contends that the Founding Fathers

established much stricter rules than they had known

in Europe. Their goal was to create a system that

would be populated by people of civic virtue who

would be buffered from temptations that could cor-

rode that virtue. Teachout builds a compelling case for

the diminishing buffer between virtue and corruption

in America.

Can we blame what may be a rise in corruption on a

single, generic source, such as changing legal rules or

the New Public Management movement? Probably

not. Corruption associated with public contract-

ing, for instance, is rampant in countries that never

discovered a “new” public management. We do know,

however, that changing institutions are ushering in

new ways of doing public business and we need to be

attentive to consequences.

As my smugness about America ’ s freedom from cor-

ruption has diminished, I have come to appreciate

that freedom from corruption is a near universal value

and metric for the adequacy of public administra-

tion around the world. My travels to countries like

Colombia, South Korea, and the People ’ s Republic of

China make me keenly aware of concerns about and

problems posed by corruption. I was just not prepared

to admit that we have a good deal of unfinished work,

even in the United States.

Our colleague, Professor Philip Joyce, recently

observed in a column he writes for Governing (Joyce

2014 ) that corruption is intertwined with ethics. He

argues that much more can be done, both in gov-

ernment and our professional schools, to reinforce

anticorruption and ethical integrity. The immediate

trigger for Professor Joyce ’ s column was Jim Svara ’ s

( 2014 ) article in the September/October issue of PAR ,