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An ‘Institution-First’ Conception of Public Integrity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2020

Nikolas Kirby Open the ORCID record for Nikolas Kirby [Opens in a new window]
Nikolas Kirby*
Affiliation:
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, UK
*
E-mail: nikolas.kirby@bsg.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

There is an emerging drive to define a new praiseworthy governance goal: a goal that not only implies addressing corruption but going further to establish institutions that are truly worthy of trust. That goal is ‘public integrity’. However, most current accounts of public integrity adopt an ‘officer-first’ approach: defining public integrity primarily as a quality of individual public officers, and only derivatively, if at all, as a quality of public institutions themselves. This article argues that this approach is flawed. Analysing the current debate, it identifies the need to define a role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour for public officers. However, it is only possible to define this role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour by referring to a public officer's contribution to the overall moral ideal of her institution. Assuming that this ideal itself is a form of public integrity, it then follows that such institutional integrity must be defined ‘first’ in order to then define a public officer's praiseworthy contribution to it second. Substantively, this article argues that ‘public institutional integrity’ is an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. ‘Public officer integrity’ is the robust disposition of an officer to support the integrity of her institution, within the course of her duties, to the best of her abilities.

Keywords

public integritycorruptiongood governmentgood governancequality of governmentinstitutional corruptioninstitutional integritypublic ethics
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 1620 - 1635
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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