Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Ethics|Law|Political Science, Public Administration'

Personal conflicts of interest among contractor employees are an increasingly visible and controversial area of U.S. Government contracting, given the U.S. Government’s expanded reliance on contractor personnel. On November 2, 2011, the FAR Council issued a final rule on preventing personal conflicts of interest for contractor employees performing acquisition functions and issued a request for information regarding whether other privately contracted services in addition to acquisition support present sufficient risk to the integrity of the U.S. Government procurement process to warrant additional regulation.

This paper will review the defects in the new rule; will evaluate what lessons can be learned from the new rule to enhance future rules governing the personal conflicts of interest of U.S. Government contractors’ employees; and recommend better integration of U.S. Government compliance regulations to include conflicts of interest rules, protection of proprietary information, and the mandatory disclosure rule to reduce contractor compliance cost and promote implementation efficiencies through integration.

This dissertation develops a normative theory of the American administrative state on the basis of Hegelian and American Progressive political thought. I reconstruct the substantive and procedural commitments of the American state from its intellectual history and institutional development. The basic principle I recover from this history is that the state must make the public sphere politically efficacious.

I begin by tracing German understandings of the state which heavily influenced certain American Progressives. G.W.F. Hegel, and the German public law scholars who followed in his footsteps, understood the modern state to have an emancipatory function. The public bureaucracy would institute the requirements of freedom through market regulation and social welfare provision. This German Hegelian theory of the state was not, however, democratic. Reflecting the failures of the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent entrenchment of constitutional monarchy in the German states, Hegelian public law scholars sought only to free individuals from conditions of domination within civil society, not to enable the people as a whole to author the laws that bind them. This amalgam of liberal social aims and authoritarian state structure gave way to a crisis-prone, president-centered regime during the Weimar Republic.

American Progressives were deeply influenced by the Hegelian political thought, but they radically revised this German conception of statehood by democratizing it. W.E.B. Du Bois, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Frank Goodnow each engaged with German Hegelian thinkers in their efforts to imagine and legitimate bureaucratic institutions that would be appropriate for the American democratic context. Like Hegel, they defended administrative efforts to promote individual freedom. But they departed from the German tradition in emphasizing that administration must be rooted in popular sovereignty. The Hegelian Progressive theory that emerges from these writers has two normative requirements: The state must furnish the material and social requisites for individual and collective autonomy, and it must use participatory forms of administration to deliver these requisites.

This Progressive conception of democratic statehood provides a coherent perspective from which to assess and critique the legitimacy of our contemporary political order. The state's substantive aim should be to protect individual and collective autonomy against the unequal circulation of information and power in civil society. The state should carry out this aim procedurally through the "discursive separation of powers," which treats each branch of the federal government as an approximate institutionalization of the public. The political branches—the executive and the legislature—have only a qualified claim to represent the popular sovereign, because they lack complete information about the problems members of the public perceive. Their qualified authority must therefore be augmented through deliberative forms of administration, which bring the people back into the policy-making process when laws are implemented. The judicial branch must police this process to ensure that administrative agencies recognize the "public rights" which are established by statutory law and rooted in public discourse.

To demonstrate how this Progressive conception of the state functions in practice, I turn to the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution. New Deal agricultural agencies partially realized Progressive ideals through subsidies for marginal farmers and participatory forms of land-use planning. These reforms wrought social changes which contributed to the formation of the civil rights movement. I then show how administrative agencies in the War on Poverty furthered radical forms of participatory governance, while civil rights agencies operationalized the discursive separation of powers in combatting segregation.

Our contemporary state continues to follow this Progressive vision in many respects, but serious problems remain: affected parties do not participate equally in the administrative process; the president sometimes supplants broad public discourse with unilateral executive action; courts and agencies often deploy a technocratic mode of analysis that fails to foster ethical judgment by administrators and value-based argument with the affected public. Despite these institutional failures, the Progressive theory continues to provide a normatively attractive vision for administrative legitimacy. It avoids the narrow economistic reasoning of cost-benefits analysis and the unstable politics of plebiscitary democracy. This theory helps us to separate illegitimate from legitimate exercises of state power in the present, on topics ranging from climate change to immigration reform. By recovering the ethical content of the institutions that have evolved from Progressive political thought, we may better realize the democratic forms and functions of our state.

During the Civil War, twenty northern states changed their laws to permit absent soldiers to vote. Before enactment of these statutes, state laws had tethered balloting to the voter's community and required in-person participation by voters. Under the new laws, eligible voters – as long as they were soldiers – could cast ballots in distant military encampments, far from their neighbors and community leaders. This dissertation examines the legal conflicts that arose from this phenomenon and the political causes underlying it. Legally, the laws represented an abrupt change, contrary to earlier scholarship viewing them as culminating a gradual process of relaxing residency rules in the antebellum period. In fact, the laws left intact all prewar suffrage qualifications, including residency requirements. Their radicalism lay not in changing rules about who could vote, but in departing from the prewar legal blueprint of what elections were and how voters participated in them. The changes were constitutionally problematic, generating court challenges in some states and constitutional amendments in others. Ohio's experience offers a case study demonstrating the radicalism of the legal change and the constitutional tension it created. In political history, prior scholarship has largely overlooked the role the issue of soldier voting played in competition for civilian votes. The politics of 1863-1864 drew soldiers into partisan messaging, since servicemen spoke with authority on the themes the parties used to attack their opponents: the candidates' military incompetence, Lincoln's neglect of the troops, and McClellan's cowardice and disloyalty. Soldiers participated politically not only as voters, but also as spokesmen for these messages to civilian voters. In this setting, the soldier-voting issue became a battleground in partisan efforts to show kinship with soldiers. The issue's potency became evident nationally after the 1863 Pennsylvania gubernatorial race, presaging the 1864 presidential contest. The Republican incumbent ran as "the soldiers' friend" and attacked his Democratic rival as the enemy of soldiers for opposing that state's soldier-voting law. The issue was decisive in securing civilian votes for the victorious Republican. That experience launched a nationwide push by Republicans to enact soldier-voting laws in time for the 1864 elections.

Poor and inadequate customer service is prevalent in the public sector of emerging economies. Also, limited leadership roles are ascribed to frontline employees in the sector. Improving customer service and empowering frontline employees could increase organizational effectiveness. The goal of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the problem of inadequate customer-service delivery skills and limited leadership roles for court personnel in the Lagos State Judiciary, Nigeria. The research was guided by two research questions: In what ways could the servicing experience of customers by court personnel/leaders in the Lagos State Judiciary be improved upon? and What are the lived experiences of leaders and customers in the Lagos State Judiciary System? The study participants’ were 25 court users of the Lagos State Judiciary. The data were subjected to analysis using the 4 step modified Van Kamm method by Moustakas to identify themes through exhaustive data coding and data distillation The 14 interview questions resulted in the emergence of 34 primary themes. Five overall themes emerged from thematic clusters and they were capacity building, attitude of court officials, policy changes, interaction with stakeholders and leadership training. The findings showed strong similarities between the participants’ lived experiences and experiences presented in relevant literature. The implication was that the management (leaders) of the Judiciary might benefit from this study by adopting the Folami Model for Improving Customer Servicing in the Lagos State Judiciary (FMICS – LSJ) to achieve customer service improvements. Researchers may wish in the future to explore the twin concepts of customer service and leadership styles in other contexts further to add further insight to existing literature.

The question of whether there is soft law in international law has been as much the subject of contemporary debate as whether or not there is private legal authority in the international society. The legal boundaries seem to be blurred by the process of globalisation and the recent shift in international law. The traditional definition of international law has been outdated as new forms of treaties has introduced new subject of law to the judicial arena. At the same time a supplementary map of law has been added to the cartography of international law, soft law. These correlating processes have comprehensive political and legal consequences at both the international and national levels. This essay examines and identifies soft law from a legal-political perspective and locates and explores private forms of legal authority on the map of contemporary international law. In respect to theory, it accounts for an interdisciplinary approach involving issues of both international law and international relations. In the process this study examines issues regarding the relative legal normativity and the blurring of legal authority in international law. The focus is on the legal character, the constitutive practices and the legal and political influence of soft law. It discusses the influence and power exerted by soft law over state actors in the international system and at the national level. The essay finds that soft law is of substantial relevance in the international ambit. To some extent a limited normative force of certain norms is recognized in soft law even though it is conceded that those norms would not be enforceable by an international court or other international organ. To say that it does not exist because it is not of the enforceable variety, might blind students of international law to another dimension of the landscape of international practice. Soft law does not translate to soft obligations in the reality of international society, and it seems to be some confusion surrounding the obligations conceived by it. The research here presented suggests that its political and legal power is substantial. The researched examples do not display any real private legal authority in soft law. This is because soft law is found to be a separate phenomenon from international law proper. However, soft law’s impact on national governments combined with the wider acceptance of the presence of private actors in the creation of soft law suggests that private power is noteworthy in comparison. In one of the studied examples, the soft law is concluded by private business representatives solely, but in requiring the status of soft law it is dependant on the recognition of the international and national legal bodies.