An Investigation Of Administrative Ethics Index

The core mission of administrative ethics is helping the government to represent and respond to pulic benefits. As an important tool for civil servants'inner control, administrative ethics are playing a more and more important role in the modern government administration process. However, to effectively raise the moral level of civil servants, objectively and correctly measuring and locating their moral level is the basic premise. Therefore, it is quite meaningful to deepen and widen the empirical research on administrative ethics.However, correctly measuring the moral level of civil servants is not an easy thing. Basing on the domestic and international status quo of empirical research on administrative ethics, the author introduced the concept system of administrative ethics index, in order to provide a conceptual apparatus and measuremnt tool for depicting the ethical conditions of Chinese civil servants.Administrative ethics index has a basic theoretical basis that the moral behavior of civil servants is determined by various social factors, and also has a basic theoretical presumption that the influentical factors of civil servants'moral behavior can be used to describe their moral conditions. Besides, administrative ethics index also defines individual attributes, organizational institutions, organizational culture and social expectation as its main dimensions, basing on the theory of "the four primary factors leading to responsible administration behavior", which was promoted by the famous American administrative ethics scholar Terry L. Cooper.The author designed ten titles under each main dimension, and then formed a questionnaire with forty titles in order to measure and predict the ethical level of civil servants.The questionnaire was used in an empirical investigation among some civil servants and public officers mainly in Guangzhou City, and the data of the 285 useful recycling questionnaire told us that in general, the ethical level of administrative organizations in Guangzhou city is just above the medium level, and the scores of organizational institutions and organizational culture are lower than that of personal morality and social expectation.Besides, author also did some comparative analyses of the collective statistic data from the angle of gender, the working length as a civil servant and administrative grades.In view of such ethical status quo, the final part of the paper promoted some suggestions for the improvement of present ethical conditions and also summarized some drawbacks of our empirical research.