Draft "Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards Ordinance"

2007

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Springer eBooks -- “Code of Ethics,” in A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. 2016): DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_930-1., 2016

The idea of codes is simple, but the utilization of codes in public administration is complex. A code presents a systematic set of standards to be observed. These standards may be based on law and regulations, principles, or the expectations of an organization or group. A code of ethics presumably grounds the standards in ethical concepts rather than simple rules of right and wrong, but that is not necessarily the case. By their nature, codes make explicit what the standards are and more or less clearly link the standards to actions that a public service practitioner should take or not take. A different approach to shaping behavior and providing ethical guidance is to consider the values that should shape behavior and leave to the individual to decide what values are relevant to a situation and what kinds of actions are consistent with the values. For example, public service motivation is based on an attraction to public policy making, a commitment to the public interest, compassion, and self-sacrifice (Perry 1997; Perry and Wise 1990). Values and motivations do not, however, provide standards for behavior. “An ethical principle is a statement concerning the conduct or state of being that is required for the fulfillment of a value; it explicitly links a value with a general mode of action.” (Cooper 2012, 21). Codes provide explicit guidance based on principles or requirements for behavior rather than relying on expectations that are implicit in the attitudes of members of a group. The use of codes in public administration is a multifaceted topic because codes can vary in many respects. It is important to understand the nature of codes, their source, what they cover, and whether or how they are implemented.

2016

Charges of personal misconduct, fiscal mismanagement, conflict of interest, and waste in government agencies perpetrated by public administrators are covered routinely by the media (Cohen, Eimicke, and Heikkila, 2008). This transparency is an important component of accountability, of course, and is to be encouraged. Professional public administrators must find ways to help ensure that conditions necessary for a democracy to flourish are maintained (Wilson, 1908). In public organizations, this is especially important because as they seek to secure and build the public trust through various accountability procedures, they must assure that these systems operate independent of the intervener (Argyris, 1980). Most often these interventions are found in codes of ethics for a profession. Fritz Morstein Marx (1949) put it this way: "Administrative morality...acquires its inner logic from the political ideology which the machinery of government is expected to translate into social reali...

U4 Brief, 2009

Can Codes of Conduct set realistic ethical standards for officials? Can training in ethics and professional standards make any practical difference in the way public officials behave? Can the notions of 'ethical competence' and 'ethical reliability' help to identify new ways of thinking about ethical performance on the part of public officials? These and related questions have been the subject of widespread research over the past two decades. Even so, in seeking to establish ethical standards and norms of professionalism, most public sector agencies today have scarcely advanced beyond the mechanism of the traditional rule-based Code of Conduct, often based on the 'core values' of the institution. Such rule-based Codes of Conduct generally aim to prohibit corruption and misconduct, rather than promoting ethical conduct in the exercise of public functions. This U4 Brief outlines the main issues behind these concerns, looks beyond to some of the reasons why traditional methods of managing ethical problems encountered by public officials often fail, and examines how this important deficit might be remedied.

Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics, 2020

In its commitment to enhance the quality and legitimacy of public administration, the Catalan government has driven the introduction of Codes of Ethics in City Councils. Turning to Ethics in order to reform public administration is more than appropriate, since the integrity of public institutions requires a certain institutional culture, which has to be fostered rather than legally enforced. Codes of Ethics are expected to contribute to that end, by sensitizing and giving orientation about the way in which public servants should develop their tasks within such local government’s institutions. However, to be effective tools for the promotion of institutional quality, their adoption in City Councils must go together with a proper comprehension of the Ethical Codes’ sense, function and limits, as well as with the introduction of ethics at the institutional level. This paper focuses on reflecting upon these issues, with the aim of both contributing to disclose the potential of Ethical Codes for the quality of City Councils and also providing some conceptual tools for enabling a genuine reform of public institutions. This will ultimately consist in turning public institutions into “thinking” organisms, able to ground all their decisions and actions in line with certain values and goals oriented at citizens’ care.

Pacific Journalism Review : Te Koakoa, 1996

This is the recomended revised Journalist Code of Ethics drafted by Australia's Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA):

2006

This paper focuses on the role of the council of a municipality towards ensuring accountable governance. First, it discusses the Code of Conduct for councillors, which is the key instrument at the hands of the municipal council to ensure accountability of the council and councillors. Second, it analyses the way in which the Code of Conduct can be enforced. Third, it presents a case study of an instance in which these instruments to enforce ethical conduct were invoked. Fourth, it provides an analysis of a key area where improvements can be made and proposes a way forward to making those improvements.

An attempt at a Code of Ethics, early in my doctoral work.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss why and how ethics reforms have been enacted by many parliaments in the course of the past decade. Our argument is fairly straightforward. Politicians' perceived irresponsiveness, various forms of misconduct and corruption scandals have eroded voters' trust in politicians and political institutions. In order to induce a more ethical behavior among politicians as well as to rebuild public trust in political institutions, ethics regimes have been adopted by several legislatures. Such regimes have generally taken two main forms: ethics codes and conduct codes. Ethics codes tend to be fairly general documents: they formulate broad principles of behavior but they do not define what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior, nor do they establish sanctions for violations of the code. By contrast, codes of conduct tend to contain very specific provisions with clear sanctions for those who violate the dispositions of the code. Terminological confusion arises, however, because some parliamentary ethics codes include dispositions and sanctions that are more commonly found in codes of conduct. This paper attempts to clear this terminological confusion, reviewing the dispositions and sanctions that may included in both ethics and conduct codes, with special attention to probable success factors. It underlines the importance of cultural factors, suggesting that one of the success factors is whether the individuals that the code is regulates actually share the same ethical standards, have a common understanding of what is appropriate behavior and a common understanding of what constitutes misconduct.