Ethics Reform

Simplifying Self-Supervision
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately, self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like laziness or selfishness is often simply exhaustion. Self-supervision gets burned up by managing the impression we make on others, by coping with...

Why Scandals Lead to Poor Ethics Reform
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that John Kotter and Dan Cohen argue in their book The Heart of Change that the sequence of change is not analyze-...

There is a great deal of thought-provoking material in Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010). Change has proved hard in every single city and county in the United States. Those seeking government ethics reform can learn a lot from this book.

There are two different types of change involved in government ethics. One involves...

New Jersey has one of the oddest approaches to local government ethics. Like several states,  including Massachusetts, California, and Florida, a state ethics program has jurisdiction over local officials. But unlike other states, the state ethics program is not run by the state ethics commission. It is run by the Department of Community Affairs.

For those of you who are tired of talk about "witch hunts," this quote will be a great relief:

"I'm concerned about a zealous ethics staff chasing down rabbit holes when there is no rabbit."

These are the words of Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia election lawyer, as quoted...

I learned this week that the board I administered until last July, the New Haven Democracy Fund board (the Fund is a public campaign financing program for the city's mayoral election), no longer has enough members to hold an official meeting. The seven-member board has three members, and it needs four members to have a quorum.

This is an especially serious problem because there is a mayoral election this year, and the mayor, whose responsibility it is to select board members, has...