ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative study on the relationship between constitutionalism and public administration ethics in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Careful observers of American Politics have always recognized the remarkable salience of constitutional considerations in our country’s governmental affairs. Thus, in the opening pages of his probing work, Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson reminds his readers that the main problems in American public administration have “little to do with limitations or inadequacies of individual bureaucrats and everything to do with the constitutional regime of which they are a part” (Wilson, 1988: 28). The same could be said of the study of any aspect of American government, including ethics in public administration. Elsewhere, I have developed in some detail the connection between ethics and constitutionalism in the United States (Rohr, 1989b). The present chapter takes a comparative approach to the same questions because I agree entirely with those comparativists who tell us that one of the best ways to understand our own government is to look at those of other countries.
