Ethics Commissions & Administration April 4, 2012

Beyond the Criminal Enforcement Paradigm: Dealing with Unwritten Rules

I have written about the need for ethics commissions to go beyond the criminal enforcement paradigm, which limits commissions to determining whether an individual respondent has violated an ethics provision or not. It is hard to find instances of a commission looking at the bigger picture, that is, at the common practices and unwritten rules that underlie an individual's ethical misconduct.
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Local Government Practice April 3, 2012

Participatory Budgeting as Solution to Council District Discretionary Fund Problems

One of the most damaging aspects of ethical misconduct in government is that it decreases the amount of citizen participation in government activities. People feel that their local government is rigged to help politicians and their families, friends, and business associates. It's not worth spending time getting involved in a rigged system, unless your goal is to be part of the in crowd.
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Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play March 29, 2012

The Black Boxes Known as Campaign Vendors

ProPublica ran an excellent article yesterday by Kim Barker and Al Shaw about campaign, PAC, and Super PAC coordination and self-dealing, primarily at the presidential level. What is so special about the article is that it follows the money to where it is being spent. The authors found that many PAC and Super PAC vendors are the same vendors, or different vendors owned by the same people, as the presidential campaigns'.
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Ethics Commissions & Administration March 15, 2012

Mayoral and Council Interference with EC Member and Staff Selection

The independence of ethics commissions and their staff is the single most important aspect of a government ethics program.
Who selects the commission members and their staff, and how, colors everything about an ethics program and determines, more than any other factor, whether the public has confidence in the commission's advice and enforcement of an ethics code. So the news from Washington, DC and Atlanta is not good.
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March 5, 2012

Carlos Fuentes on Government Ethics

The great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' 2006 novel, The Eagle's Throne, translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero, is one of the best political novels I've ever read. I highly recommend it. The novel also happens to contain some great quotes that touch on government ethics. The government may be Mexico's, and national rather than local, but that won't get in the way of enjoying these wonderful quotations, which you'll find by clicking on the post title or book cover.
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