Ethics Environments

One of the most effective ways to create a good ethics environment is by telling the full story of the bad ethics environment that preceded it. If someone or, better, a number of people, have the courage and integrity to not only admit publicly to what they and their colleagues did, but to tell it like a story, a group story, it will have a cathartic effect. It will cleanse the community and act as a point where everything is in the open and continues to be in the open. It will make it easier...

Oxytocin is a hormone released by the hypothalamus portion of the brain which, among other things, makes people trust each other more. In other words, one could argue that local government ethics seeks to increase the release of oxytocin in the brains of people when they think about their local government.

An article in today's New York Times discusses a study that shows how the positive...

It not only takes a number of officials to allow unethical conduct to occur, it also takes a number of officials to undermine the effect of a good ethics program. An ugly example occurred recently in North Providence, Rhode Island, a city where three former council members are awaiting trial for charges of extortion and bribery.

Sometimes concepts derived from one area of study, for one purpose, can be valuable in another area of study, for another purpose. This is true of the concepts of "injunctive norm" and "descriptive norm" derived by social psychology professor Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University for use in the area of persuading people not to do certain things, such as litter.

The recent arrest of the Prince George's County (MD) executive and his wife, who is a new member of the county council, shows how wrong it is to give the county executive and individual council members power over development projects, a topic I've written about with respect to Dallas and...

What can local government ethics professionals learn from what has come out in the recent indictments of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his father, the city's director of water and sewerage, Kilpatrick's CAO and CIO, and a city contractor?