Ari Salminen

Trust, good governance and unethical actions in Finnish public administration

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study and contribute to the discussion of administrative ethics and integrity by investigating three ethical issues, namely trust, good governance and unethical actions in the Finnish public administration.Design/methodology/approach – The evidence of this research is based on empirical data from a National Citizen Survey implemented in 2008 by the University of Vaasa. The questionnaire was sent to 5,000 Finnish citizens and the response rate was 40.4 percent.Findings – The strength of the Finnish society concerning trust is that the citizens feel confident in public sector organizations and societal institutions. Even though serious corruption cases have remained few in Finland, there is still work to do in order to keep the situation under control. Ignorant and bad treatment of citizens occurs mostly in individual service encounters, it does not reflect the whole of the ethics of administration.Research limitations/implications – Further res...

Accountability, values and the ethical principles of public service: the views of Finnish legislators

The subject of this article is public service ethics. In the context of the Finnish welfare model, the essence of the ethical administrator is analysed by three issues: accountability, ethical values and ethical principles. In the article, these topics are mainly discussed through the viewpoints of elected representatives. Finnish legislators were asked their opinions, attitudes and expectations towards these issues. The empirical material of the study was gathered through a separate survey given to all Members of Parliament. The article also tries to link the empirical findings to the current debate of public service ethics research.

Looking for governance configurations of European welfare states

The aim of this article is to provide empirical findings on welfare-state governance through the application of a particular comparative procedure: Qualitative Paired Comparison. This procedure is utilized to outline governance configurations, clusters of aspects that are relevant to responding to governance challenges. The examination of governance configurations focuses predominantly on structural institutional features (see Wilensky, 2002). Empirically, the article concentrates on public administration in the governance of European Union member states. Governance has no singular meaning, either in practice or in research (Rhodes, 1997). It has been used in the context of the overall evaluation of the quality of national states (World Bank, 2003), the interaction between governments (Rosamond, 2000), and the provision of welfare for citizens (Merrien, 1998). Nonetheless, there have been many efforts to capture the essential features in the word’s usage. According to Stoker (1998), governance deals with the conditions for some specific shape of ordered rule and ensuing collective action in order to reduce and manage complexity. In this sense, Stoker goes on to identify five aspects of governance. It refers to institutions and actors drawn both from and beyond government, and to the blurring of boundaries and the mixing of responsibilities in tackling social and economic issues. It also refers to mutual dependence and vigorous exchanges between the institutions involved. It is not a matter of hierarchy or anarchy, but of networks of actors, and here, coordination, equilibration, integration and regulation are important. It is argued in this study that the concept of governance configuration enables comparative research which then makes it possible to focus upon diversity within a rather small set of cases. This focus positions our analysis within what is known as the configurative approach to comparison (Verba, 1967; Mintzberg, 1979; Miller and Friesen, 1984; Miller and Mintzberg, 1987; Ragin, 1989; 1994; 2000). The configurative approach involves exploring the middle ground between ‘treating analytic objects as members of fixed, homogenous populations, on the one hand, and focusing exclusively on the specificity of individual cases, on the other’ (Ragin, 2000: 35). Unlike some other configurative efforts, the explanatory capacity of configurations is not highlighted here; they are used mainly as classification constructs. Even so, the general purpose of statistical and other comparisons to support the validation and cross-validation of conclusions will be important in this analysis (Maxwell, 1998). The comparison is restricted to a set of 15 cases: the European Union member states prior to the latest enlargement. Comparability can be expected here since the European Union is a definite common denominator among these states. The comparison of these 15 states is performed by applying the Qualitative Paired Comparison procedure. The basic objective is to search for empirical governance configurations, made up of two or more states which show likeness in the chosen variables. This procedure makes new classifications available, and, to some extent, challenges some well-known existing classifications. It follows, then, that the question is not only about the procedure itself, but about what variables will be included in the comparison. New and confirmed existing classifications are considered here as combinations of three different sets of variables. First, the analysis will take aspects of economic institutions into consideration: specifically, the size of the public sector and the publicLooking for governance configurations of European welfare states

Exploring the Public Service Ethos

This article studies the public service ethos of managers (i.e., their set of shared ideals and values). The subjective viewpoints of managers are examined using the Q-method. Three different ethical profiles emerge. The findings suggest that new market values have not infiltrated the value sets of respondents as was expected.

Decent citizenship, justice and trust as cornerstones of legitimation: tensions between generations in Finland

The aim of this article is to analyze ethical issues related to the problem of legitimation. The article discusses the tensions of legitimation in light of three ethical topics: decent citizenship, trust, and justice and equality. Citizens’ assessments of ethics and tensions of legitimation are described and discussed in the context of Finnish society. Special attention is paid to the question of whether generational gaps matter. Are the perceptions of the three different generations (age-groups) distinctive and can these perceptions be explained by the gap between generations? The results of this study show that there are ethical considerations where the generation seems to make a difference. The youth, in particular, differ very significantly in their attitudes and opinions from the other two age-groups. Thus explanations based on the generational factor have proven relatively strong. The differences between the generations were evident in many ethical statements which are presented in more detail in the article. The empirical evidence of the study is based on two large batches of empirical data. Both are surveys implemented in Finland in 2008 and 2009. The first one is a citizen survey of 5000 Finnish citizens. The second survey is a youth survey of 1130 Finnish school students. Points for practitioners The article will be of interest to practitioners in describing Finnish citizens’ current perceptions about such ethical issues as decent citizenship, justice and equality as well as trust. The study reveals the differences in ethical valuations between the three age-groups. The article also provides a theoretical framework which can help in understanding tensions of legitimation through chosen ethical values.