ABSTRACT
Before the 1990s, only a handful of scholars in the United States was engaged in empirical research that focused on public administration and government. Those efforts, such as Bowman’s surveys (1977 and 1990) of public administration practitioners and Hejka-Ekins’s (1988) study of ethics pedagogy in graduate public administration education, were laudable and valuable-yet very limited compared to the effort put into ethics theory (see Chandler 1983; Cooper 1982, 1984, 1986, 1987; Denhardt 1988, 1989; Dobel 1990; Frederickson and Hart 1985; Gawthrop 1984; Hart 1984; Nigro and Richardson 1990; Rawls 1971; Rohr 1976, 1978, 1989; Thompson 1985). Bowman’s (1990, p. 345) comment aptly characterizes the pre-1990 state of empirical research on administrative and governmental ethics: “Empirical studies form a small part of this body of knowledge . . . many of them focus on business management, have a low and perhaps unreliable response rate, poll students, do not include attitudinal data, and/or are now outdated.”
