This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 28, 2013 - Research has tied positive ethical environments in local agencies to everything from public trust in the agency, to employee satisfaction, productivity and performance, to good policy making procedures and reducing injury and sick leave. However, only a few limited data sets are available on the actual frequency of unethical behavior in local government.
The prime difficulty is that it is notoriously difficult to obtain honest answers about actual levels of unethical behavior. Of course, without this data, it is very difficult to determine whether the ethics measures that are becoming widespread in local government are having any effect.
UMSL’s Center for Ethics in Public Life recently completed a pilot project designed to address this issue. The survey included public officials and employees across the entire state.
In the good news column: Ethics measures are spreading rapidly in Missouri municipal government, almost 7 out of 10 Missouri municipalities have a code of ethics. About half had some or strong emphasis on ethics training for officers and employees.
When presented with statements describing a positive ethical environment in their agency (statements such as “superiors would respond appropriately if they became aware of improper conduct,”) more than two-thirds of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed, another one in five had no opinion, leaving only about one in 10 to disagree.
In the bad news column: A wide variety of unethical behavior is evidenced in Missouri municipal governance. Respondents were asked how often they had seen certain kinds of ethical behaviors during their public careers: never, rarely, sometimes, often, or always. It is important to realize that these numbers do not correspond to the number of people actually behaving unethically. They correspond to how many people have seen such a violation over the course of their (sometimes decades-long) careers in public service.
The good news: The data show that unethical behavior in Missouri local government is not out of line with national data on unethical behavior in the private business sphere. This denies the common cynical position (often cited as a reason for not voting) that public servants are an inherently crooked and power-hungry breed, out only to benefit themselves. The truth: Politicians and public servants are no more crooked than anyone else.
But the bad news: The data show that unethical behavior in Missouri local government is not out of line with national data on unethical behavior in the private business sphere. What about holding the public sphere to a higher standard? It turns out politicians and public servants are also no less crooked than anyone else.
Given these revelations (perhaps simply that politicians are human just like the rest of us) the most interesting finding of the survey gives us some reason to hope. The data suggest that ethics measures can have some effect on unethical behavior.
Although ethics codes by themselves did not seem to reduce the number of observed infractions, having a code made it much more likely that a municipality offered ethics training. Having an ethics training program was associated with a noticeable reduction in ethics violations among a variety of common violation categories. The reduction was not huge, and less evident for the truly criminal acts (embezzlement, theft) but it was substantial nonetheless.
The broad lesson is that human ethical behavior is both fairly stable across job categories and amenable to thoughtful intervention. Governments owe their citizens an effective ethics policy that is substantial enough to address public servants’ human fallibility and flexible enough to allow for an effective political process. Let’s hold them to it.
Walter Siewert is assistant professor and director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.