ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses more on executive-bureaucratic culture than public service ethics perse. It shows that officials often find themselves subject to competing views of accountability. The chapter also focuses upon the swing of the pendulum away from pluralism back to hierarchy, a swing associated with the rise of public choice theory until its apogee in the early 1990s. The principal theorists who argued for the integrity of the bureaucratic culture in the nineteenth century did not anticipate pluralism as it has developed in modern advanced democracies. Indeed, they remained strongly enamoured with the concept of the public service as a type of priesthood. Public choice stressed the immense leverage of the career public service in exploiting their expertise and positional advantage to play the political leadership, legislators and interest groups one off the other in order to maximize their budgets.
