لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
Indeed, we think that not only should the investigation of public attitudes not be
abandoned but that efforts in this direction should be increased; for not only are they
crucial to an understanding of the substance and significance of political corruption
as we have argued so far, but, in the form of concerns about the standards of
conduct of public office holders, they present three very concrete challenges for
European democracies.
First, and most obviously, public confidence that standards are being maintained
may be assumed to be intimately bound up with the strength of political institutions
and therefore with democratic stability – the presence or absence of such confidence,
and of stability, being mutually reinforcing.
Second, concerns about the conduct of public office holders have seemingly come to
be an increasingly prominent feature of public life in European societies over the past
15 to 20 years. First, the development of the mass media of communications,
including the Internet, has given citizens an unprecedented level of access to the most
intimate details of their representatives’ lives (Thompson, 2000). Second, in an age
when parties’ policy differences are harder to detect than in the past, attempts to
tarnish political opponents have acquired growing significance as weapons in the
competition to mobilise voters. Third, at European level, events such as the outcomes
of the 2005 referenda on the European Constitution have created a growing
awareness of the impact that confidence in public office holders, national as well as
European, will have on prospects for further development of the EU and for
European integration.
Finally, while studies of the expectations and perceptions of general publics in
relation to the standards of conduct of public office holders have a long history,
in many countries they are few and far between – in Britain, for example, the first
systematic investigation only came with the Committee on Standards’ survey in
2004 – and there are few if any investigations of a cross-national, comparative
kind.
It was with this in mind that, in March 2007, a workshop was held at the
University of Salford with the aim of bringing together European scholars who
would, through paper presentations on the situation in their respective countries
explore: (1) The current ‘state of the art’ regarding research into public norms and
values, and into perceptions and evaluations of the conduct of public office holders;
and (2) the related theoretical and conceptual issues that require addressing in order
to advance beyond the current position.2 All but one of the following papers are
revised versions of the papers presented at that workshop.
Though each focuses on a specific country or area, together the papers suggest
four important themes of general relevance for the investigation of values and
perceptions in the area of public probity. First, though it seems possible to establish
what, in abstract terms, publics say they regard as acceptable and unacceptable on
the part of public office holders, these attitudes are but one factor influencing the
expression of condemnation in any particular instance. In other words, public
condemnation seems never to be a simple function of the intrinsic qualities of given
acts, but rather, as de Sousa’s and others of the papers suggest, to be related to a
seemingly almost infinite range of criteria people may use to evaluate a given act
including their assessments of: its legality; how widespread it is; who did it; why it
was done and with what consequences; the degree to which the perpetrator could be
expected to have behaved differently; the motives and the credibility of those
bringing the act to public attention, and so on. And because people do not sanction
in any automatic way behaviour deemed to be illegitimate, lack of consensus and
normative conflict – or ‘greyness’ – stands out as the dominant feature of the way in
which this behaviour is publicly apprehended – as the analysis of Lascoumes and
Tomescu-Hatto makes clear.
