Ethical Codes for the Public Administration. A Comparative Survey

This report is an analysis of a number of ethical codes for the national public administration. We present four theoretically grounded reasons for why such codes have been established and in many countries are seen as necessary. These are the limits of laws, the role of expertise in politics, the limits of steering by economic incentives and the problem of “self-interest” in public office. Our analysis departs from earlier studies in that we have included a number of non-western countries. One reason for this is to see if there exists a universal understanding of which values the civil service should uphold or if there are differences between countries from different regions in the world. Our ambition is not to study the effectiveness of these codes or prescribe values that should be included. Instead, our goal is to highlight which values are important across all codes, while also diving in to the deeper conversation about how these codes differ and reasons why this might be. The result is that there are striking similarities in the expression of most core values, particularly Impartiality, Legality, Reliability, Equal Treatment, Integrity, and Professionalism. Differences exist, for example in values relating to building state capacity (meritocracy, competence, performance) which are more prevalent in developing countries. There is also a difference between “aspirational codes” that emphasize values like service and courtesy to the public and “compliance codes” focusing on values like loyalty to the government and rule following

Internet, Censorship, and Corruption. The impact of online censorship on the internet’s potential to reduce corruption

Since the advent of the internet, the world has witnessed the explosive growth and development of technologies that provide us with ever-increasing means of accessing information and connecting with one another. This technology is now available in most nations across the world and is used by more than 40% of the world’s population. How does this technology impact our society? Recent evidence suggests that this technology can help in the fight against corruption. But how it does that and what factors limit this potential deserve further investigation. In particular, little is understood about how censorship online impacts this potential. Approached quantitatively using a cross-sectional multiple regression analysis, this study attempts to contribute to that discussion, examining how the effect of internet use on corruption is impacted by government censorship online. This investigation is conducted globally on the country level, measuring how internet cen-sorship interacts with the effect of internet use on several corruption indicators. Furthermore, the study looks at how this interaction affects both grand and petty corruption. The findings support the hypotheses that increased internet use is related to lower levels of corrup-tion, but in societies with high levels of online censorship increased use is instead related to higher levels of corruption. Furthermore, while this relationship seems to exist for grand corruption at the executive and legislative levels of government, this relationship is less clear for petty corruption, particularly at the administrative level of government. Keywords: internet, censorship, corruption, press freedom, horizontal communication, social opennes

Losing Your Grip: Feelings of Control and Unsubstantiated Political Beliefs

Widespread corruption has equally widespread impact on the people and functioning of that society. However, while abuses of power may be found in all societies, in many places corruption is far less common and individuals are unlikely to experience it firsthand. In these less-corrupt settings there are nonetheless surprising portions of the populace that believe corruption and related abuses of power to be widespread. Even if unsubstantiated, these perceptions are troubling because they can nonetheless result in serious consequences for individual attitudes and behaviors that have ramifications for the society. Despite this, we still understand relatively little about the roots of these perceptions, particularly in settings where these perceptions are unlikely to be driven by the experience of corruption. This dissertation suggests that the issues of corruption and electoral misconduct present individuals with a plausible explanation for a host of individual and societal problems they might face, and heightened perceptions of corruption may thus offer those individuals a means to compensate for real or perceived limits to personal control. Theoretically, I draw from and expand upon research that has demonstrated threats to personal control to increase susceptibility to other unsubstantiated beliefs such as conspiracy theories as a compensatory response. I argue that several features found across these kinds of beliefs can make perceptions of corruption and election fraud an effective and potentially low-cost response to limited personal control, with these features also being found in populist rhetoric. However, the compensatory potential offered by these beliefs is conditional upon several societal factors, which are most consistently found in well-functioning democratic societies. I explore this issue in four papers, examining how personal control is related to perceptions of corruption and election fraud, as well as the appeal of populist rhetoric, in well-functioning democratic settings relative to the nature of this relationship in settings where corruption is more widespread. Across these studies, I find that increasing feelings of limited control are associated with increased perceptions of corruption, greater belief in election fraud, and increased support for parties using populist rhetoric. This association is strongest and most consistently found in the countries that are both least corrupt and perform best on democratic measures. The results highlight areas where further research is needed to better understand the drivers of these perceptions. They also suggest growing challenges that may be posed by ongoing sociopolitical developments