Personality traits of municipal politicians and staff

Canadian Public Administration

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 273-289

  Ashton, Michael ^a   Kushner, Joseph ^a,b   Siegel, David ^a,c  

^a BROCK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b St Catharines City Council

^c Department of Political Science ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547851136     PISSN: 00084840     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-7121.2007.tb02013.x     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Joel D. Aberbach, Robert D. Putnam and Bert A. Rockman, Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
2. Joseph Kushner and David Siegel, "Council/staff relations: A case study," Municipal World 105, no. 5 (May 1995), pp. 13-14.
3. Trevor Price, "Council-Administration Relations in City Governments," in James Lightbody, ed., Canadian Metropolises: Governing Our Cities (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1995), pp. 193-214;
4. th ed. (Scarborough, Ont., Thompson Nelson, 2004).
5. Donald J. Savoie, Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers and Parliament (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
6. T.J. Plunkett, City Management in Canada: The Role of the Chief Administrative Officer (Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1992), p. 40.
7. David Siegel, "Politics, politicians and public servants in non-partisan local government," CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 37, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 17-30.
8. Robert T. Golembiewski and Gerald Gabris, "Today's city managers: A legacy of success-becoming-failure," Public Administration Review 54, no. 6 (November/December 1994), pp. 525-30;
9. Douglas F. Morgan and Henry D. Kass, "The American Odyssey of the Career Public Service: The Ethical Crisis of Role Reversal," in H. George Frederickson, ed., Ethics and Public Administration (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 177-90.
10. Plunkett, City Management in Canada, p. 5.
11. Michael Fenn, "Building effective council-staff relations," Municipal World 113, no. 4 (April 2003), pp. 17-22;
12. Anne Louise Heron, "Council-staff harmony: Using a sound policy framework helps," Municipal World 113, no. 4 (April 2003), pp. 25-8;
13. Carolyn Kearnes, "Successful municipalities: CAOS can make the difference. Part 1 - What good CAOS do," Municipal World 115, no. 7 (July 2005), pp. 25-6.
14. James H. Svara, "Dichotomy and duality: Reconceptualizing the relationship between policy and administration in council-manager cities," Public Administration Review 45, no. 1 (January/February 1985), pp. 221-32;
15. James H. Svara, "The shifting boundary between elected officials and city managers in large council-manager cities," Public Administration Review 59, no. 1 January/February 1999), pp. 44-53.
16. P. Edward French and David H. Folz, "Executive behavior and decision making in- small U.S. cities," American Review of Public Administration 34, no. 1 (March 2004), pp; 52-66.
17. Plunkett, City Management in Canada, p. 30.
18. Joseph Kushner and David Siegel, "It's not too late to develop good council-staff relations," Municipal World 106, no. 7 (July 1996), pp. 17-20;
19. Kushner and Siegel, "Council/staff relations," Municipal World.
20. Sandford Borins, "Loose cannons and rule breakers, or enterprising leaders? Some evidence about innovative public managers," Public Administration Review 60, no. 6 (November/December 2000), pp. 498-507.
21. Lewis R. Goldberg, "The structure of phenotypic personality traits," American Psychologist 48, no. 1 January 1993), pp. 26-34;
22. Robert R. McCrae and Oliver P. John, "An introduction to the Five-Factor Model and its applications," Journal of Personality 60, no. 2 (June 1992), pp. 175-215.
23. Michael C. Ashton et al., "A six-factor structure of personality-descriptive adjectives: Solutions from psycholexical studies in seven languages," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86, no. 2 (February 2004), pp. 356-66.
24. See, for example, Michael C. Ashton et al., "The criterion validity of broad factor scales versus specific facet scales," Journal of Research in Personality 29, no. 4 (December 1995), pp.432-42, for a discussion of the importance of assessing narrower traits in addition to broader factors of personality.
25. At the federal level, respondents report that their primary motivation for seeking office is a desire to formulate public policies, followed by service to their local community. See David C. Docherty, Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), pp. 111, 115-17, 120-27, 133-35.
26. See also Steve Paikin, The Life: The Seductive Call of Politics (Tororito: Penguin Canada, 2002).
27. Borins, "Loose cannons and rule breakers, or enterprising leaders?," Public Administration Review.
28. John Geddes, "'Thugs' in the Government," Maclean's, 1 November 2004, p. 17.
29. Douglas N. Jackson, "The dynamics of structured personality tests," Psychological Bulletin 78, no. 3 (May 1971), pp. 229-48.
30. Samuel D. Gosling, Peter J. Rentfrow and William B. Swann Jr., "A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality dimensions," Journal of Research in Personality 37, no. 6 (December 2003), pp. 504-28.
31. Ibid.
32. nd ed. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1988).
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. In addition, we examined differences between politicians and public servants in the amount of variation in personality within each group. Using F-tests of the equality of variances for the two groups, we found that the politicians were more variable than were the public servants (p < .05) in the specific personality traits of "individualistic" and "conflict-oriented" and in the Big-Five agreeableness factor. In contrast, the public servants were more variable than were the politicians (p < .05) in the Big-Five openness to experience factor, although this latter result partly reflects the fact that twenty-one per cent of the politicians, but only eleven per cent of public servants, reached the "ceiling" score of 7.0 on the openness to experience scale. Overall, this suggests that the politician group may be slightly more heterogeneous than the public servant group, a possibility that is consistent with the wider age range among the politicians, noted above.
36. For a comparison of traditional public-service values and the new or post-bureaucratic values, see Kenneth Kernaghan. "The post-bureaucratic organization and public service values," International Review of Administrative Sciences 66, no. 1 (March 2000), pp. 91-104.