Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Crime, Law and Social Change - The widespread implementation of anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) has been an important public administration trend of the past decades. Considering the multifaceted...     

A Belated Debate

The three televised leaders’ debates dominated the 2010 general election campaign. The House of Lords Communications Committee report on Broadcast General Election Debates is the product of a welcome but belated public inquiry into their organisation and conduct. The report is supportive of the view that ‘broadcast general election debates should take place during future campaigns’ and makes a number of cautious recommendations to the broadcasters. At the time of writing it was unclear whether the format proposed by the broadcasters for 2015 would be an improvement on that for 2010—or even if there would be any debates at all.     

Judging politicians: The role of political attentiveness in shaping how people evaluate the ethical behaviour of their leaders

Political theorists have developed well‐defined normative understandings of what constitutes ethical political conduct. Based on democratic theory as well as the demands of practical politics, these understandings prescribe certain types of behaviour and proscribe other types. However, it is unclear to what extent this normative framework has resonance for ordinary citizens. This article demonstrates that attention to politics tends to increase the resonance of this normative framework. The analysis identifies three norms about the holding of public office that are expected to structure citizens' ethical judgments: the avoidance of conflicts of interest; conformity with the law or institutional rules; and the maximisation of the public good. The article assesses the importance of these norms in structuring judgments by means of an experiment embedded in a population survey conducted in Great Britain. The analysis finds that informational cues pertaining to conflict‐of‐interest avoidance only condition responses among the attentive, while information pertaining to law conformity has far wider resonance. This finding has implications for approaches to political ethics focusing on normative considerations that appear to have low salience for much of the general public.     

Republican justice

I raise three objections to Philip Pettit's republican account of justice: (a) that it fails to account adequately for the role of certain values such as substantive fairness; (b) that it represents an uncomfortable hybrid of egalitarianism and sufficientarianism; and (c) that it fails Pettit’s own ‘eyeball test’. I then conclude in a more constructive vein, speculating about the kind of account of justice it is supposed to be and suggesting that, construed a certain way, it may have resources for answering the three objections.