There's a lot of food for thought in the February 21 decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in the case Lodge No. 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Philadelphia.

The suit was brought in order to end the prohibition on police officers making campaign contributions to local candidates directly or through a party or PAC, including the police union's own PAC. The suit was brought against the city and its ethics board, which had promulgated regulations based on the 1951 ordinance (see especially regulations 8.8 and 8.14).

The suit was based on First Amendment free speech and free association arguments, as well as a Fourteenth Amendment equal protection argument.

Simplifying Self-Supervision
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately, self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like laziness or selfishness is often simply exhaustion. Self-supervision gets burned up by managing the impression we make on others, by coping with fears, and by trying to focus on complex instructions.

With respect to government ethics, officials have trouble following ethics rules, especially those with numerous exceptions. At best, they put all the ethics burden on their lawyers, that it, the city or county attorney. At worst, they ignore the rules altogether.

Neither solution is good. The best way to change the way officials deal with conflict situations is to keep the rules simple. This is consistent with another of the Heaths' "surprises" about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. If you want people to change, the directions have to be crystal clear.

Government ethics proceedings are usually not very satisfying for those involved. Individuals rarely get to tell the entire story from their point of view. Nor do they profit from hearing how others saw the situation or experienced the events. The format for ethics proceedings is similar to the criminal justice system, with charges, a prosecution, witnesses, documents, and the ethics commission as jury. Or a settlement is reached, the equivalent of a plea bargain, and no story is told at all. Or no probable cause is found, and what happened is kept secret (or told, often in nasty little bits, online).

Most of what is said is said without much knowledge or understanding of government ethics and without truly listening to what others have to say, since they are seen to have their own personal or political goals.

In this blog post, I will present a thought experiment on how a restorative justice approach could be employed in government ethics proceedings. I learned about the process from an incredibly informative and moving feature article, by Paul Tullis, in this week's New York Times Magazine, entitled "Forgiven" or, online, "Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?" Although my emphasis is more on the process than on the forgiveness, the article presents the information necessary for my thought experiment.

In memory of Albert O.Hirschman, an important economist and political scientist who died last month, I want to apply some of the ideas from his most famous book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), to local government ethics (back in 2009, I pulled out a few thought-provoking passages from his 1983 book, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action).

Of the three concepts in the title of Hirschman's book, loyalty is the one most often encountered in government ethics. Loyalty in a government organization is one of the primary causes of ethical misconduct, and one of the most serious obstacles to an organization instituting an ethics program that will successfully prevent ethical misconduct and deal with it effectively when it occurs.

In February, I wrote seven blog posts applying some of the concepts and practices of nonviolence to the field of government ethics. This is effectively an eighth post. This time the inspiration is not a book, but the latest issue of the journal New Routes, entitled "Peace Without Borders: Regional Peacebuilding in Focus."

This issue takes recognition of the fact that war does not occur in isolation in only one country. Political and ethnic leaders of neighboring countries are often involved, either militarily or through providing money and arms. If wars are regional, then peace solutions must also be regional. Europe is the best example of success in regional cooperation not only to bring about peace, but to institutionalize it so that war is almost impossible.

The same is often true of government ethics.

It's been a few years since I wrote about the problems with the partisan, or "bipartisan," administration of local elections. One thing that arisen from this year's election is a strong feeling that it is high time that New York City's Board of Elections be reformed. Hopefully, this process will get a great deal of publicity, and become a guide for other communities.

The principal problem in New York City, as in many other cities and counties throughout the country, is the state's election laws. According to an article this week in the New York Times, the state constitution "sets the parameters for how all elections in the state are managed, requiring that Republicans and Democrats be equally represented at all levels of election administration."

In other words, bipartisanship is the rule. Bipartisanship means control of the election process by the two major parties, which can't manage to agree on very much other than keeping the powerless members of minor parties (not to mention those who have chosen not to register as a member of either party) not only out of power, but also out of election administration. The two major parties have ensured their control of elections not only in laws, but also in constitutions, which are much harder to change. If this were to happen in a poor country, we would call it a power grab and insist that election boards be as nonpartisan as possible, including people from all parties and as many independents as possible.