Edward C. Banfield

Corruption as a Feature of Governmental Organization

This is an exploratory paper, the purposes of which are to identify the principal variables having to do with corruption in governmental organizations in the United States and to point out some significant relationships among them. The paper begins by setting forth a conceptual scheme for the description and analysis of corruption in all sorts of organizational settings. This is applied first to the “typical” business and then to the “typical” governmental organization. (The reason for introducing the business organization into the discussion is to create a contrast that will highlight the characteristic features of governmental organization.) In the concluding section some dynamic factors are noted.

Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior.

Our concern here is with the nature of the individuals attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voters self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

Ends and Means in Planning

The word planning is given a bewildering variety of meanings. To some it means socialism. To others, the layout and design of cities. To still others, regional development schemes like TVA, measures to control the business cycle, or “scientific management” in industry. It would be easy to overemphasize what these activities have in common; their differences are certainly more striking than their similarities. Nevertheless, there may be a method of making decisions which is to some extent common to all these fields and to others as well, and that the logical structure of this method can usefully be elaborated as a theory of planning.

Political Ethos Revisited

An effort to test the existence and correlates of the “unitarist” and “individualist” political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels “middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos” and “immigrant ethos”) in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of attitudes. In general, the respondents displaying each attitude or two or more attitudes in the predicted combinations have the predicted ethnic, religious, income, and educational attributes. Jewish voters, however, are less likely than predicted to have the good government attitude, whereas Irish and Polish respondents are more likely to have it. Upper-income Yankees were strongly unitarist as defined by all three attitudes.

Policy Science as Metaphysical Madness

In the past dozen years or so, policy-oriented social science research and analysis has become a growth industry in the United States. This has occurred in response to demand created by the spate of social welfare programs initiated by the Great Society and, for the most part, continued and expanded by the later administrations. Whereas in 1965 federal agencies spent about

The Training of the Executive

235 million on applied social science research, in 1975 they spent almost

Present Orientedness and Crime

1 billion. Of the approximately

Party “Reform” in Retrospect

7.4 billion spent in these eleven years about two-thirds was under contract.1 This brought into being several large independent research bodies, some quasi-public and others private, and it greatly increased the amount of university-based policy-oriented social research and the supply of social scientists. According to the 1970 census, the number of social scientists increased by 163 percent in the 1960s, an increase larger than that of any other major occupational group nearlythree times that of professional and technical workers as a whole.

In Defense of the American Party System

The postwar popularity of executive development programs raises in slightly new form the old question of what should be the training of the executive. An executive development program is a conference, course, or seminar lasting from one or two days to a month. Executives, drawn usually from “middle management,” are brought together, usually under the auspices of an academic institution or a trade association (the American Management Association is one of the chief operators in the field), to hear talks by “experts,” usually professors of administration or executives of large organizations, to engage in discussions, and in some cases to engage in “simulation” of administrative situations.2 Many businesses every year send several of their “coming men” to these institutes expense. Until recently federal employees were not so fortunate; the agencies were not permitted to use their appropriations to send employees to “outside” training institutions. Many federal employees took development courses, but they did so at their own expense or on grants from foundations. The Government Employees Training Act of 1985 has given the agencies more freedom, however, and no doubt the demand for executive development will increase accordingly.

The Zoning of Enterprise

Since the seventeenth century, political philosophers have maintained that an irrational bias toward present as opposed to future satisfactions is natural to both men and animals and is a principal cause of crime and, more generally, of threats to the peace and order of society.1 It is to protect men against this irrationality that civil government exists. Hume makes the fullest statement of the case. All men, he says, have a “natural infirmity”—indeed a “violent propension”—that causes them to be unduly affected by stimuli near to them in time or space; this is the “source of all dissoluteness and disorder, repentence and misery,” and because it prompts men to prefer any trivial present advantage to the maintenance of order, it is “very dangerous to society.” Government is the means by which men cope with this defect of their nature.