Vera Vogelsang-Coombs

Mayoral Leadership and Facilitative Governance

This analysis offers a contingency model of mayoral leadership based on a long view of a citys institutional context and substantive interests. This model generates four distinct governance types or styles of mayoral administration—populism, progressivism, constitutionalism, and managerialism. The author uses empirical evidence drawn from familiar mayoral administrations to analyze shifts within and across these governance types. By integrating normative public administration into the dynamics of urban governance, this model yields robust findings concerning mayoral—regime relationships. The author concludes that the renewal of a fiscally stressed big city is in facilitative governance. Facilitative governance blends managerialism and constitutionalism, whereas its normative basis is democratic conservatorship. By activating the ethos of public administration, a mayoral conservator facilitates the regime conditions necessary for economic, political, and social inclusion.

Dynamic Interpretations of Civic Duty: Implications for Governance

This essay explores the norms of civic duty, based on the legal, ethical, and practical interpretations of democratic citizenship. The authors find that interpretations of civic duty are dynamic and touch on a fundamental political question: What is the proper balance between elected officials and the professional civil service in a liberal democracy? They conclude that the norms of civic duty are political interpretations concerning an institutional struggle over governance as much as they are matters of law, ethics, and best practice. Successive interpretations of civic provide an opportunity for the renewal of citizenship while channeling political conflict into liberal democracy’s established institutions

Bureaucratic Governance Perspectives and Democratic Public Service: Institutional Ideals and Threats

This chapter reviews the ideals, ethics standards, and accountability relationships of office holding within the political institutions of democratic public service as an integral part of career public servants’ and their political superiors’ governing together in bureaucratic governance. Next, it analyzes the clashes of governing perspectives and administrative politics that create estrangement between career public servants, their political superiors, and the public. The chapter also analyzes the institutional challenges to democratic public service and the political-ethical dilemmas peculiar to bureaucratic governance. This analysis highlights the partisan-driven reforms designed to dismantle democratic public service in the name of modernizing American government. These reforms, if disconnected from constitutional processes, may morph into institutional pathologies that threaten the democratic freedoms of citizens in their routine encounters with government.

“What Will I Do?”: Clarifying Self-Interest

This chapter explains how ethical inquiry allows career public servants, as moral philosophers, to clarify their motivations and purpose when unsure about what to do in everyday situations. The chapter distinguishes between two perspectives of self-interest underpinning their motivations: narrow (reactive responses to achieve instant or deferred gratification, to conform to, or to follow, habit) and broad or enlightened (drawn from shared moral knowledge). Next, the book advocates the philosophical standard of logical reasonableness in moral justifications to find higher-order reasons and proximate causes for judgments and actions by interpreting knowledge in relation to career public servants’ own situations while controlling for self-interest. Thus, career public servants can articulate valid, objectively sound theories to discern why their choices are right or wrong.

The Political Ethics of Constitutional Professionalism

This chapter discusses how the elimination of abusive administrative practices in bureaucratic governance requires a comprehensive institutional approach to restore the balance between bureaucratic authority and the liberty and equality of citizens. This chapter advocates career public servants’ acting as constitutional professionals and outlines the elements of constitutional professionalism, including the use of external controls provided by representative political institutions such as grand juries. This chapter also argues for strengthening the constitutional system of checks and balances in bureaucratic governance by encouraging more rigorous legislative oversight and greater diversification of democratic public service through the adoption of the norms of representative bureaucracy and consultative administrative practices. The chapter concludes with guidelines on how career public servants may behave as constitutional professionals in their day-to-day operations.

Federalism, Constitutional Law, and the Politics of Freedom

This chapter defines the major role that public servants play, as constitutional stewards, by engaging in constitutional politics to defend and nurture the US constitutional system and to foster changes in the governance of American society. After discussing two of the features of constitutional politics (federalism and constitutional law), the chapter examines the explosive dynamic of each by analyzing the historic debates over homeland security and slavery. This analysis demonstrates the significant, long-lasting impact of public servants’ participation in constitutional politics through the way societal tensions and political conflicts of antebellum America culminated in extreme interpretations of federalism and constitutional law that favored slavery and secession and influenced constitutional thinking and politics after the Civil War and well into the twentieth century.

“What Am I to Be?”: Personal Loyalty, Thick-Thin Morality, and the Crisis of Conscience

This chapter analyzes the interplay of career public servants’ personal loyalties and individual consciences in shaping their behavior in urgent situations. Drawing from moral philosophy, the chapter advocates a self-appraisal technique enabling them to review and reorder their personal loyalties, inner conflicts, and official obligations, when deciding their purposes and courses of action. The chapter next explores thick-thin moral expressions taken from American societal private and public morality that helps individuals account for morally objectionable, though necessary, political choices when fulfilling their constitutional duties. Illustrating how loyalties, thick-thin moralities, and personal conscience work together, the chapter uses the Gettysburg Address to show how President Abraham Lincoln resolved his crisis of conscience to exercise strong moral and political leadership during the Civil War.

Racial Profiling: Abuses of Bureaucratic Authority That Threaten the Liberty of Citizens

This chapter analyzes the impact of institutional pathologies derived from the professionalization and unionization of the civil service systems in executive-branch bureaus on career public servants’ governance behavior. Specifically, it focuses on toxic bureaucratic subcultures tolerating the abuse of citizens in the latter’s routine encounters with government. This chapter examines local law enforcement’s practice of racial profiling as an example of pathological bureaucratic governance. The chapter then delves into racial profiling’s institutional roots that engender unlawful actions, especially toward citizens of color. After discussing ways to strengthen the rule of law and representative (citizen-centered) political institutions as a check on bureaucratic authorities, the chapter concludes with the implications of racial profiling, implications pertaining to any executive branch agency where administrative abuses toward citizens persist.

The New American Way of Ethics: The Political Ethics of Constitutionally Centered Public Service

The conclusion summarizes why the political ethics of public service is a better ethos to govern American society than the prevailing American way of ethics and why constitutionally centered democratic public service qualifies as a bastion of public trust. Operationalizing John Rohr’s normative administrative theory, political ethics enables career public servants to function as constitutional balance-wheels to achieve constitutional equilibrium in government. The book concludes with a proposal for a rigorous leadership program designed to acclimate career public servants to on-the-job intellectual, psychological, moral, and political challenges. Besides preserving American self-government based on universal values—equality and liberty—the political ethics of public service catalyzes ethical progress in US society while endowing Americans with a future of great political possibilities

Case Study of Cuyahoga County, Ohio: The American Way of Ethics

The book opens with the case of influence peddling in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to illustrate “the American way of ethics”—a condition that treats governmental ethical breaches with quick apolitical fixes, including the conspicuous consumption of ethics products, such as ethics codes and training, and the adoption of legal sanctions, which fail as remedies because the partisan status quo remains intact. Although aimed at ameliorating public outrage over corrupted governments, the quick ethics fixes dismantle the discretion of career public servants by reducing their moral responsibility and criminalizing democratic public service. The book then suggests the political ethics of public service as an alternative providing a better approach for balancing change and continuity in morally tainted governments without demonizing career public servants.