Abstract

This dissertation examines the importance of career civil servant attributes or values that have been posited in the public administration literature during the last century, and test whether there is a distinct public administration ethics for the career bureaucracy based on those values. The work reports on normative expectations and public management values among Colorado government employees, state legislators, and voters. In recognition of the increasing professionalization occurring within the bureaucracy, the work also empirically tests the "separatist thesis"--that professions have a morality or ethics of their own, different from and perhaps inconsistent with the morality or ethics of ordinary persons or the general public. ;Public administration ethics has grown in importance since Watergate and Vietnam, and yet there is no agreed upon conceptual framework for the field. However, two paradigms or frameworks--a bureaucratic ethos and a democratic ethos--are described and tested using 48 public administration values in this quantitative survey research. The hypotheses and theory testing utilize both descriptive and inferential statistics, and also apply such techniques to the nature of bureaucratic accountability. ;The dissertation concludes that there are significant importance differences in identified public administration norms and values among Colorado career civil servants, including differences based on gender, education and job classification, as well as differences about the persons or groups to which the career bureaucracy ought to have accountability, and the nature of that accountability. Moreover, there are substantial and significant differences in the expectations for merit system employees between the career bureaucracy, on the one hand, and state legislators and voters on the other. Bureaucrats are not homogenous as a group in terms of their values, nor are bureaucrats just ordinary citizens. No separate or unique professional public administration ethics was ascertained, but identifiable values that constitute a contemporary professional public administration ethics are nonetheless described and ranked. Also explained are public management class values. Further, some empirical research implications for the politics-administration dichotomy, the tension between bureaucracy and democracy, and the teaching of public administration ethics are suggested