Conference Agenda

The distinctive and characteristic aspects of the political office influence the moral decision-making and behavior of politicians. This literature review is the first to analyze 91 articles from public administration, political science and related disciplines to systematically map these aspects and their underlying mechanisms. Our findings reveal that extant research focuses mostly on unethical behavior of political office holders, creating blind spots in our understanding of how the political office shape individual and collective processes of ethical decision-making and behavior more generally. In addition, this conduct is mostly studied as being shaped by the macro-systems such as the democratic and electoral system in which the office is embedded. We conclude with an agenda for future research that advocates for more targeted study of the social reality of the political office to guide the shaping of more ethical decision-making and behavior as well.

Among the OECD's recommendations for building a coherent and comprehensive public integrity system is a commitment to increase integrity and reduce corruption by setting clear expectations for the highest political and managerial levels through exemplary personal behaviour. While it may be possible to achieve compliance through the use of fear and coercion, these recommendations suggest that more beneficial results are likely to be achieved by encouraging public officials to follow their intrinsic motivation towards integrity (OECD 2017, 29).

In Merton's original definition (1957), role models refer to individuals in specific roles who serve as examples of the behaviour associated with that role. In this paper, we argue that when public institutions emphasise certain aspects of the behaviour of individuals who serve as examples, their purpose is to develop role models as a source of inspiration.

Role models have three distinct functions (Morgenroth, Ryan, Peters, 2015): they act as behavioural models, they represent the possible, and they are inspirational. According to the last function, the role model thus initiates a process in which the role aspirant is inspired to become more like the role model.

Taking the case of the French senior civil service as an example, this paper examines two different but complementary ways of promoting certain behaviours in terms of public ethics and their capacity to act as role models:

a) the use of competency frameworks as a human resources management tool to define expected qualities and behaviours,

b) the institutionalised recognition and appreciation of outstanding merits and qualities among senior civil servants who are labelled as "grand commis de l'Etat". Following the death of some highly respected senior civil servants, the institutional history committees of the French public administrations publish books of tributes in the form of testimonials in order to honour these individuals and highlight their qualities.

The development of competency frameworks in public administrations is a phenomenon that dates back to the 1980s has gradually spread to all European countries (EUPAN 2007, Skorkova, 2016, Struzyna et al, 2021). Each of the competences has a list of effective and ineffective behaviours, which are the criteria used to assess performance (Op de Beek and Hondeghem, 2010). Some of these relate directly to ethics and public integrity.

Similarly, official sources (Comité d'histoire du Conseil d'État, 2022), as well as academic works on administrative honours (Ihl 2007) in line with the theory of distinction (Bourdieu 1979), demonstrate the social function of valuating some individual qualities, especially when they are presented as virtues.

This paper discusses the possible contributions and limitations of using such role models to develop integrity systems. On the basis of the ethics-related competences listed in the official competency framework for French senior civil servants adopted in 2024, we will first examine what kind of behaviour is expected and for which purpose. In a second section, we will identify which representations of public ethics and virtues are highlighted in official publications celebrating the legacy and memory of some "grands commis de l'Etat".

This paper investigates how public sector use of contacted-in private consultants affects the public sector ethos. The research questions to be answered are 1) How do public agencies take public sector values into account when making decisions on hiring consultants to work for them, i.e. when contracting-in services? 2) When consultants are contracted in, what measures are taken to integrate them into workplace norms, and to what extent are they perceived as part of the organisation?

In order to build legitimacy for their decisions and activities, public organisations and public servants must strive to uphold a specific set of values. This public sector ethos demands a sharp division between public and private interests and rests on impartiality and legality (the practice of treating people fairly according to the rules). Intended to uphold the institutional and individual level integrity of the public service it also demands possibilities for scrutiny, accountability and the responsible use of resources (efficiency). While this ethos is often prescribed by democratic constitutions and are at the core of rule of law-oriented institutions it also depends upon public sector practices, or culture. Thus, the public sector ethos can be part of socialization processes for new recruits.

However, the division of public- and private sector values is today challenged by the practice of contracting private sector consultants to fulfil tasks within public organisations, often working side-by-side with public servants on core agency functions. Some private consultants are hired by government agencies because they have different skill-sets than public servants, while others are hired to perform the same type of tasks and duties as the permanent staff. In both situations, the terms of employment differ between consultants (who are private employees) and public servants. Prior research on effects of private consultants on public sector ethos is rather limited. The practice of contracting-in consultants has been described as an “invisible public service” (Howlett & Migone 2014; van den Berg et al. 2019) or a “consultocracy” (Hood and Jackson 1991, 24) that challenges public accountability procedures and democratic governance (Ylönen & Kuusela 2019). Others frame the potential effects more openly suggesting that the ways in which ethos, expertise and status are recognised by private consultancies and public organisations respectively will affect how tasks are defined and distributed between them (Seabrook and Sending 2022). At the very least, government agencies’ awareness of the potential challenge, and introduction of consultants to the workplace, could impact the extent to which use of private consultants will challenge the public ethos.

In this paper, we focus on Swedish government agencies’ recognition of the public sector ethos, and compare their strategies for introduction of different categories of employees, including private consultants, to their organisation. Based on a survey with Human Resource Management (HRM) officers in Swedish central government agencies (N=176), we map formal and informal ways of socializing new recruits (Hein 2023) into the public service ethos and discuss observed variation across agencies.