Bureaucrats are human beings and subjective agents. Each of them has feelings as an independent individual and performs their assigned duties according to their normative perceptions. In contemporary governments facing post-New Public Management (NPM) governance, the portrait of the low-level bureaucrat, as envisaged by Weber, sitting behind a desk, obsessed with improving their skills in performing assigned tasks, and depicted as a mechanical and indifferent public official, can no longer be considered an icon of the modern bureaucrat.

Street-Level Bureaucracy, defined by Lipsky as public servants positioned as mediators between institutions and citizens, identifies three crucial dilemmas: autonomy versus control, responsiveness versus standardisation, and demand versus supply.

Since the 1990s, the emphasis on visible results and efficiency in government, as part of the NPM, has transformed the government's position in public governance. Alongside efficiency and economy, it has also raised discussions about the ethics, moral values, and ethical considerations that should be part of good government in the public sector. The literature on public service motivation (PSM) can be considered one of those debates. PSM studies in public administration have gained momentum, and numerous papers have been published, along with discussions that sought to establish the need for the term 'public' in PSM.

As the meaning of 'public' is discussed, it becomes difficult to escape discussing another dilemma for the actors charged with front-line responsibility for public service delivery: the ethical dilemma. Street-level bureaucrats who implement this are continuously engaged in service delivery work, considering and comparing various possible outcomes when making decisions, often on their own. While considering the three key dilemmas mentioned above, the question of what values they hold and under what sort of thinking, via the lens of ethics, they work is one of the most important new questions for contemporary public administration studies. This is the research question of this study.

This study approaches that question using the Q Methodology, which focuses on holistically capturing human subjectivity. A concourse of 42 statements of ethical preferences was designed along six dimensions: (i) Commitment to the Public Interest, (ii) Compassion, (iii) Self-Sacrifice, (iv) Efficiency and Economy, (v) Fairness, and (vi) Compliance.

The survey is planned for April 2024, targeting police officers and private security guards. Police officers are positioned as one of the typical Street-Level Bureaucrats' jobs, required by society to have high ethical standards. Private security guards are employed in seemingly similar roles to police officers, but their employers have a different and clearer mandate to protect. By using the same statements as a comparative target for survey and analysis, it will be able to demonstrate distinctive corpora of ethical values specific to police officers. Also, it may discover ethical values that are statistically approximate between private security guards and police officers.

Based on the results, this study will not only make a basic research contribution in revealing the subconscious of as yet unseen Street-Level Bureaucrats but also indicate pragmatic implications.

The characteristics of the political office poses challenges to the moral decision making and behaviour of political office holders. Notwithstanding cross country differences between political offices in different political systems and ranging across various levels of government , the political office has distinctive and characteristic qualities which create a dynamic of its own . This gives rise to specific incentives or constraints on moral decision making and behaviour of political office holders in different phases of the political cycle, ranging from gaining electoral support , managing power conflicts while in office or navigating the ending of the term in office. However, we know very little about how the

distinctive and characteristic qualities of the political office affect the moral behaviour and decision-making of political office holders.

Whereas influential literature reviews have been published on integrity in government, to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive overview exists on how the distinct qualities of the political office influence various forms of moral conduct. To this end this article systematically reviews international peer reviewed literature from different disciplines within the social sciences that research political government in relation to moral decision making and behaviour. This literature is drawn from public

administration , political science, law, management studies, and social and applied psychology. To assess what we already know about how moral decision making and behaviour is influenced by the political office, we formulated the following research question:

What is known about the distinctive and characteristic qualities of the political office that influence moral decision making and behaviour of political office holders?

Each included academic discipline is defined by its own set of paradigms, theoretical concepts, and research methodologies related to moral behaviour and decision making. We use open source systematic review software with machine learning (AS Review Lab) to review the resulting large body of literature This software creates a relevance based order based on what is learns from your choices when labelling records as relevant or irrelevant. This allowed us to synthesize ninety four articles on moral decision making and behaviour of political office holders.

This study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the known characteristic and distinct qualities of the political office that influence moral decision-making and behaviour of politicians. Our results show that different incentives for moral conduct arise at different phases of the political cycle. This means that the distinctive and characteristic qualities of the political office that influence the holder’s decision-making and behaviour can be categorized according to start, occupancy, and exit . The different qualities

range from the pressure to finance expensive campaigns to the pursuit of political survival and back to the dilemma of influence peddling. This systematization of moral decision making and behaviour is evident at different levels of government as well, spanning from local politicians to national presidents.

Our study paints a clear picture on what is known about this topic. The article concludes by discussing a clear research agenda to advance our understanding of moral behaviour and decision making of political office holders. This exploration lays out the groundwork for more informed theoretical and empirical research on the topic.

Integrity and ethical behavior in the public sector are of utmost importance for its ability to function. However, organizations do not function on their own, they are governed by and peopled with those who have dedicated their career to public service. The behaviors of these people collectively form the behavior of public sector organizations, such as municipalities.

Within municipalities different professions can be found. There are elected or appointed public officeholders and civil servants. Both public officeholders and civil servants have the responsibility to act in an ethical way as they fulfill their role within a municipality. While members of both professions are bound to these ethical norms, there seems to be a difference in how they are treated when displaying unethical behavior.

A possible explanation for this difference could be that civil servants are more likely to display unethical behavior. A second hypothesis is that both professions are governed by different legal system. The third explanation might be that differences can be explained by the profession, meaning that the innate traits of the professions lead to a difference in dealing with unethical behavior.

The proposed paper will describe research into this matter and explore the above‐mentioned hypotheses. This exploration will abstract from the national level. If the second or third hypothesis is true, the paper will explore the consequences. This will include an exploration whether the professions could benefit from reflection on each other’s standards and practice.

In the Netherlands, many public and private organizations came under scrutiny last year due to unsafe and/or toxic work cultures. Journalistic articles extensively discussed the role of leadership in these situations. This focus is logical, as multiple studies highlight the relationship between ethical leadership and a healthy work culture (Treviño, 2014; Zwanniken & Ruijter, 2022). According to Treviño, ethical leaders: 1) have their moral compass in order and exhibit exemplary behavior for the organization, 2) discuss dilemmas and help organizations navigate them, and 3) communicate this behavior effectively, including through media interactions. While the first two aspects are frequently studied, the relationship between media and the expression of leadership is rarely examined.

In this research, we (a mixed group of researchers from ethics, journalism, social studies) conducted a frame analysis of media representations to explore how ethical leaders are portrayed in Dutch talk shows. We found that the "human interest or human impact frame" is the most common, particularly concerning female leaders. Male leaders, on the other hand, are more often invited within the "economic consequence frame," where they discuss economic developments or the consequences of their decisions. In none of the talk shows are the leaders asked to reflect on their own leadership; none of the leaders explicitly refer to their own actions in relation to failures or frictions.

These findings were discussed in semi-structured interviews with leaders of various public and private, small and large institutions to examine how these media portrayals align with their definitions and practices of ethical leadership. These interviews we subsequently analyzed, looking for similarities and differences between the two sectors and testing if the scale of the organizations involved really mattered. We were curious to see if ethical leadership, apart from the application within organizations, can also be of help with complex multi-actor issues. And who can determine what ethical leadership essentially is? Also we tried to establish a link with the rich concept of practical wisdom as a guideline for ethical leaders. Practical wisdom is a notion first developed by Aristotle; it means the skill (often based on the ‘tacit knowledge’ of a rich experience) to know what is the right way to act in a specific situation. The concept has been adapted for modern use by Bent Flyvbjerg (in his seminal study Making Social Science Work, 2001) and Kristján Kristjánsson (with Blaine J. Fowers, Phronesis, 2024). We would like to present the outcomes of our research and discuss them with you in an incubator session, in order to set up a new, more thorough research project around ethical leadership and practical wisdom for the next 2-3 years.