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Public officials reflect almost as wide a divergence of attitudes toward intergovernmental relations as would be found among the whole population. It is not possible to at- attribute a single pattern of attitudes to all public officials. It may be possible to identify a pattern of attitudes which char acterizes a group or subgroup of public officials. Professor Weidner found the most favorable attitude toward intergovern mental relations of any subgroup to be among welfare officials. Some information about the attitudes of officials was revealed by the 1955 questionnaire of the House Committee on Govern ment Operations. In 1957-1958, Congressman L. H. Fountain, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations of the House Committee on Government Operations, conducted extensive hearings producing a mass of data about the attitudes of public officials. Then in 1962, the Senate Committee on Government Operations, through its staff, conducted an exten sive survey by questionnaire of the attitudes of all levels of public officials. An analysis of the data secured by a ques tionnaire submitted to national, state, and local officials in Minnesota was published in 1960. The study sets a pattern which could be followed in other states to determine the extent to which its findings are typical of all states in the context of examining intergovernmental relations as human relations.

This article discusses the moral importance of privacy and its place in the lives of public officials. It examines the tension between the legitimate claims of citizens and overseers to scrutinize the private lives of public figures and the rights of officials to privacy. It argues that these legitimate reasons break down in practice almost all barriers to scrutiny due to the weaknesses of the limits and the incentives of American politics and the modern media. The article explores the consequences of a world where public officials possess no private lives. These unsavory consequences exemplify the dangers of denying any boundaries between private and public. The article concludes that citizens need to redefine the boundaries of private and public life and suggests standards by which citizens can judge the private lives of public officials.

AbstractThis article analyzes the positions of top public officials on an equity‐efficiency trade‐off and the determinants of those positions. It uses data from a survey across 14 European countries. The results show that differences in public officials' positions on equity‐efficiency are related to the context in which they work and to their personal background. Officials at the top of the hierarchy and those with a business or economics education are more oriented toward efficiency. Additionally, results show important differences associated with country administrative culture, including a stronger equity orientation in Scandinavian countries, and a stronger efficiency orientation in Southern European countries. The positions of public officials reflect those held by citizens in their country, confirming the contextualized nature of administrative values. This article contributes to understanding the determinants of public officials' dominant values.

In late 1996 the Queensland government introduced new legislation to govern its public sector, the Public Service Act 1996. For a few short weeks the supposedly draconian legislation was front‐page news, as the government was forced to defend its changes to standards of accountability in public sector employment. Was the fuss a storm in a teacup? Were the changes really so significant? In this article the impact of the legislation upon the central core of public sector employment, the public trust, is considered, and the legislation's interrelationship with the Queensland public sector ethics regime is analysed.These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people: of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels).

This chapter looks at the views public officials have of citizens, in particular their level of trust toward citizens' ability, integrity and benevolence, when engaging in administrative interactions. Public officials' trust is essential, in interactive governance, because it may stimulate the compliance and trust of citizens toward public administration. In turn, this may increase the effectiveness of public service delivery. Public officials' trust builds over time when they have interactions with trustworthy citizens. Hence, trust between public officials and citizens is at the same time an essential requirement for interactive governance and an outcome of such interactions. Extensive research thus far has not yet revealed many individual factors of officials' trust toward citizens nor their perceptions of citizens' trustworthiness. In addition, few studies have been conducted on the institutional and organizational factors of trust and trustworthiness. We discuss this research before suggesting avenues for future studies.

AbstractCollective action among public officials is necessary for the effective delivery of many social services, but relatively little is known about how it can be fostered through policy reforms. In this article, we compare cooperation among public officials within decentralized versus centrally‐administered municipalities in Honduras. Leveraging a quasi‐experiment in health sector reform, coupled with behavioral games and social network surveys, we find that decentralization is associated with greater cooperation. When they are able to communicate, health sector workers in decentralized municipalities contribute more to a public good than their centrally‐administered counterparts. This increase in cooperative behavior results in part from the decentralization reform engendering greater numbers of interactions and stronger ties across different levels of government. These findings indicate that institutional reforms like decentralization can favorably reconfigure patterns of social interactions across public organizations, which is an important component of administrative capacity in developing countries.