ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between political, social, and cultural polarization and the perceived increase in administrative evil. With the growth of the modern administrative state, modern public management ethics scholars largely ignored the issue of administrative evil. Many public ethics management scholars argued that with professionalization of public service, the frequency of official misconduct would decline. The adoption of civil service systems supported this argument. But as the administrative state grew more powerful, popularly elected officials, including presidents of the United States, found it impossible to resist making use of the administrative state to implement their public policy agenda. The chapter argues that political polarization effectively deactivated traditional methods used to prevent presidential administrations from misusing bureaucratic power. The chapter argues that political polarization has emboldened presidential administrations to press the limits of presidential power. This has significantly increased the likelihood of a president engaging in immoral conduct.
