Abstract
Ethics for Contemporary Bureaucrats: Navigating Constitutional Crossroads is an excellent addition to the extant literature and conceptual development of public administrative ethics. Its mission is to expound upon, expand, and apply the framework developed by John A. Rohr on “regime values” as a basis for administrative ethics. The book honors and celebrates Rohr’s work on the 30th anniversary of publication of his Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values (second edition, 1989). Its publication is propitious as it arrives while hyperpolitical partisanship presents public administrators with extraordinarily complex ethical challenges. Editors Nicole Elias and Amanda Olejarski have fashioned an outstanding contribution to the “constitutional school” of U.S. public administration that will commendably fulfill their objective to “educate students, scholars, and public servants on constitutional values and legal precedent as a basis for understanding ethics in the public sector” (p. 195).
The “constitutional school” denotes a loosely connected group of public administration scholars and reflective practitioners whose work is informed by a recognition that constitutions, and the U.S. Constitution in particular, matter to how public administration is organized, what it does, and how it does it. That constitutions matter to bureaucrats’ and bureaucracies’ work may strike many as obvious. However, when public administration was emerging as a field of study in the 1920s and 1930s, it was widely believed that administration is a single process, wherever practiced, and largely separate from constitutional questions.
Contending to the contrary, the constitutional school owes much of its identity to the academic work of Professor Herbert Storing at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Rohr was among the many UChicago doctoral students in political science upon whom Storing had a profound impact. Rohr, in turn, further developed knowledge of how constitutions matter to public administration in a variety of ways, including ethics, through his research, teaching, and writing at Virginia Tech. He was central to the movement of the fledgling constitutional school from Chicago to Blacksburg, where the “constitutions matter” mantle was further developed by several faculty in Refounding Public Administration (1990), also known as the “Blacksburg Manifesto.” With strong connections to the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, the editors and contributors to Ethics for Contemporary Bureaucrats admirably carry the constitutional school and “Manifesto” forward.
“Regime values” are “values of [a] political entity that was brought into being by the ratification of the Constitution that created the present American republic” and “beliefs, passions, and principles that have been held for several generations by the overwhelming majority of the American people” (p. 131). They are found in political speeches, literature, art, law, public actions, and myriad other activities and wellsprings that define the U.S. national ethos. Most precisely, perhaps, regime values are articulated and analyzed in major Supreme Court decisions dealing with fundamental questions of U.S. constitutional law. Regime values define ethics for bureaucrats because public administrators are bound by oath to support the Constitution.
Regime values are sometimes crystal clear and precise in their application. However, they may be in tension with one another, subject to multiple interpretations, and provide only general guides for ethical administrative behavior. Consequently, regime value analysis in not intended to “make all bureaucrats march in lockstep” because “there is no one ‘authoritative’ interpretation of the American experience that all bureaucrats must adopt” (p. 54). Rather, regime values provide a strong basis for bureaucrats to engage in informed and enlightened constitutional thinking and discourse before taking public action. They provide “enough structure to guide public servants” while also leaving room for “administrative discretion” in “striking a balance between the responsibility to make the right decision and maintaining moral character in achieving the public good” (p. 199).
Rohr’s analysis of regime values tended to be at a broad, abstract level that is somewhat removed from the kind of specific questions and decisions bureaucrats confront in their day-to-day work lives. Ethics for Contemporary Bureaucrats complements Rohr’s approach by astutely analyzing how regime values apply to a variety of concrete public administrative activities and situations. Specifically, the book is divided into three parts focusing on the regime values of freedom, property, and social equity. Part I focuses on the regime value of freedom. Chapters cover regime values pertinent to bureaucratic ability to pursue the public interest in clean air despite opposition from the three constitutional branches: disaster management, budgeting, and in “the interplay of freedom and fairness” with respect to the housing mortgage crisis of 2008 (p. 196). Part II considers the regime value of property. Here chapters are devoted to traditional property (buildings and land), intellectual property, “property” in one’s financial privacy, and the influence of private property (donations) on public institutions (universities). Part III addresses social equity in nonbinary gender identification, voting rights, criminal justice, and access to residential broadband. The book concludes with succinct review and synthesis of its main takeaways.
The various chapters effectively deal with some of the thornier complexities of making regime values a basis for ethical administrative action. Rohr’s concept of regime values as a basis for bureaucratic ethics required that the regime itself is “fundamentally just” (p. 105). He was aware that regime values thought to promote freedom and justice at one time may later be viewed as repressive and unfair. At a minimum, a just regime must offer a peaceful process for negating regime values that have outlasted their historical time. In the United States, constitutional law as well as constitutional amendments can serve that purpose. Another complexity is that enduring regime values may require updating through modification. This may be the case as equality, defined in the current constitutional law of equal protection, is confronted with pressures to better accommodate the broader value of social equity (p. 7, Note 1; pp. 39–40, 153–154, 184–185). Relatedly, social equity measures requiring positive rights may currently be an uneasy fit with the Constitution’s emphasis on negative liberties (p. 174).
Ethics for Contemporary Bureaucrats makes invaluable contributions to contemporary public administration and public management as fields of study and arenas of practice. It strengthens the conceptualization and utility of the regime values framework. It demands a wide readership and that bureaucrats raise their eyes from their daily tasks to look at the big pictures to which their work contributes—ethically running a constitution. The book is also ideal for a variety of courses in public administration and management, ranging from introductions to the subject matter to those devoted specifically to ethics and administrative law. To the editors’ and contributors’ great credit, the more practitioners and students of public administration who read this book, the better and more ethical public bureaucracies we will have.