Issue № 29. December 2011

Characteristics of Government Ethics Regulation in the USA

Graduate student, School of Public Administration, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
E-mail: k-botcharova@hotmail.com

American civic culture is based on a notion that any government authority is derived from the American people and that all public officials should perform their duties in the interests of the public. Meanwhile the U.S. public service is highly politicized, and that involves great public attention paid to its activities. For that very reason the ethical issues are highlighted not only on the government level, but also on the regional and local authorities’ levels, and for various associations, devoting their activities to studying the ethical dilemmas of the public service, which creates a wealth of data on the subjects.
Since the first code of public ethics was developed in the USA in 1954 and  the ethics-coordinating body of the federal level was created in 1978, ethics regulating procedures have undergone many changes. The semicentennial experience of creating a public ethics infrastructure, especially a common legal system that regulates the ethical sphere of the public employees’ professional activity, implementing common standards of conduct is of particular interest to the comparative analysis and application of the positive results in the Russian Federation, there the “ethical” of public service reform still hasn’t begun.

Keywords

Ethics regulation, public administration, ethics coordinating bodies.