Resources & Learning

Francesca Gino, Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar and Julia LeeTo build on the gains made in recent years, ethics training will have to accomplish several goals.  First, ethics training needs to focus on unleashing participants’ intrinsic motivation to be ethical, rather than rely on solely on a compliance men…

NEW! The Regulation of Local Lobbying. The first book on the subject of local government lobbying is now available. By Robert Wechsler, Director of Research-Retired.Local Government Ethics Programs in a Nutshell, a free 27-page introduction to the topic. By Robert Wechsler, Director of Research-Ret…

Most books of relevance to local government ethics deal with administrative ethics, that is, the ethical behavior of government administrators, rather than with conflicts or government ethics programs. However, they do deal partially with government ethics, and it is valuable to see how government …

I just read a classic work of philosophical psychology, Self-Deception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), wherein Herbert Fingarette takes an interesting approach to a phenomenon common to politics, but which seems paradoxical and, therefore, difficult to understand. How can someone effectively lie to…

Lecture by Dr. Bill English Larry Lessig has a concept of Institutional Corruption (IC) as a deviation from the purpose of the organization.  This is shown graphically by a compass pointing north--true north is the purpose of the organization; if you get pulled off of true north (like with a magnet…

An essay of mine has appeared in the new issue of the journal Public Integrity, a special issue entitled "Changing of the Guard: The 75th American Society for Public Administration Anniversary Symposium: Visions and Voices of Ethics in the Profession" (Fall 2014, Vol. 16, No. 4). Since the journal …

I just finished reading a masterpiece of a novel about Nuoro, a town in Sardinia:  Salvatore Satta's The Day of Judgment, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh. It's a very wise, witty, and sad novel. Here are a few pearls of wisdom that shed light on local government ethics. "Being mayor m…

This is the second post on Alan Rosenthal's The Third House: Lobbyists and Lobbying in the States (CQ Press, 1993). This post focuses on the importance of connections over influence, the role of money and constituents in local lobbying, and local lobbyists as relatively unprofessional, and what tha…

Although twenty years old and about the state level, Alan Rosenthal's The Third House: Lobbyists and Lobbying in the States (CQ Press, 1993) provides valuable food for thought about lobbying at the local level. This first of two posts looks at such topics as the importance of relationships to lobby…

Laura Hartman and Crina Archer's essay "False Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths and Ethical Blind Spots" (January 2012) provides a valuable new view on how our blind spots hamper our handling of ethical matters. Double Blindness Their first valuable observation is that, "[i]f left uninterroga…