The Oath of Office as Public Value Guardian

Abstract

The oath of office is perhaps the ultimate means to set public office apart: Public functionaries in most countries have to swear to let public interests prevail over private concerns. This seems at odds with the prevailing liberal/managerial idea that public and private employment is not distinct at all. The oath of office establishes a moral commitment to the office that transcends a contractual, managerial, and/or legal approach to public authority. It signifies the guardianship of public officers and links personal conscience with public values and public interests. This article concludes that we should guard against using an oath of office as a remedy against increased reliance on private interests and motivations; rather the latter may endanger a public service ethics and annul any meaning and function an oath may still represent to begin with.

Pointless or Powerful: The Case for Oaths of Office

“…To honor the oath is to invoke truth, beauty, goodness, and unity. As Rutgers (2010) states, “the oath of office . .…”

“…xvii–xviii). Broadly construed, the vow can be regarded as three in one: an oath of purification (to affirm that the office was obtained fairly), a political oath of loyalty (to the Constitution), and a professional oath (to perform with integrity; Rutgers, 2010, p. 434). Inculcating a sense of responsibility, the pronouncement is a mark of being a public servant, it is a part of what he or she is.…”

“…This focus provides the basis for a moral community, the foundation of “ethics for bureaucrats,” and the rationale for professional autonomy. In fact, Rutgers (2010), in evaluating the history and content of oaths, in addition to their role in the profession, saw these officials as public service guardians—a function at risk as civic virtues get subordinated to New Public Management practices which have no tradition of evaluating the implications of its values (also see Bowman & West, 2019; Steen & Rutgers, 2011; Stensöta, 2010).…”

Public Value Governance: A Framework

“…Values originate as individual-level heuristics for making decisions. Individual preferences are of the result of combining multiple sources of values, including task-or role-based values (Ostrom 2005;Paarlberg and Perry 2007;Rutgers 2010), general affective values (Schwartz 1992;Schwartz and Bilsky 1990;Rescher 1969;Rokeach 1973;Paarlberg and Perry 2007), or process values (Jørgensen and Bozeman 2002;De Vries 2002), which are important in helping people decide how they will express their values, how they will participate in public processes, and how they will seek to influence others, and for evaluating both outcomes and the participatory experience (West 2004;Van der Wal et al 2011;Bozeman and Johnson 2015). Individuals must order these competing values in any given context in order to identify a context-specific preference or set of preferences (Witesman and Walters 2015;Van der Wal and Van Hout 2009).…”

Codes of Good Governance

“…They provide ideals and values to strive for and indicate situations to be avoided (Gilman 2005). Like taking an oath (Rutgers 2009), these ideals and values are expected to refer to matters above the individual's private life, to behavior in one's official capacity.…”