While a growing body of research argues for increased attention to ethics within public administration, scholars diverge on how to conceptualize the character of public ethics. Likewise, empirical evidence regarding the role that ethics plays in the quality of service delivery is rare. The author argues that the concept of a public ethics of care is useful for public administration in welfare states. She examines the idea empirically through a large‐N analysis of frontline bureaucrats within the Swedish Social Insurance Administration. The analysis develops two general measures of a public ethics of care as well as a public ethics of justice. The author proceeds to show a clear presence of an ethics of care in the Swedish public sector. Further, analysis shows that these two ethics measures are supplementary, not contradictory, and that age is the main individual determinant behind ethics of care, strongly correlating with number of years in office. The conclusion underscores how public ethics of care results from acquired experience in fulfilling care‐oriented tasks.

Scholars have argued that recruiting more women to office is an effective way to curb corruption; however, the more precise mechanisms underlying why this may be the case have remained unclear. We use meso-level theories to elaborate on the relationship and suggest that institutional logics mediate the effect of gendered experiences on corruption. We make two propositions: First, we suggest that the relationship between more women and lower levels of corruption is weaker in the state administration than in the legislative arena, because the bureaucratic administrative logic absorbs actors' personal characteristics. Second, we refine our institutional argument by claiming that the stronger the bureaucratic principles are in the administration, the less gender matters. We validate our theory using data provided by the European Commission (EC) covering the EC countries and original data from the Quality of Government Institute Expert Surveys, covering a larger set of countries on a worldwide scale. The ArgumentCorruption, or the act of using public power for private ends, can be considered a major destructive force for humans and human societies. Research has shown that corruption is one of the most detrimental factors currently afflicting the economies of developing countries. It further undercuts various dimensions of human well-being, such as health, access to clean water, and education as well as negatively affects subjective dimensions such as human subjective well-being and happiness (Halleröd et al. 2012;Rothstein and Holmberg 2012;Swaroop and Rajkumar 2002). Moreover, corruption may have deeper destabilizing consequences in society, as it arguably threatens not only the direct output of government, but also its prerequisite: people's willingness to pay taxes. Its negative consequences are further not isolated to developing countries, but also concern developed countries. In a recent study, Stefan Svallfors (2013) compare attitudes toward taxes and social spending across European countries and conclude that the organization of government affects people's judgments of how well government works (absence of corruption), which in turn affects their preparedness to pay taxes, leading to long-term consequences for possibilities to pursue encompassing welfare state policy. Hence, as an overview by Treisman (2007) shows, a vast body of research confirms how serious the problem of corruption is perceived to be.There are clear correlations between gender and corruption. On the one hand, women suffer disproportionately from the effects of corruption, as women are overrepresented among the world's poor. 1 On the other hand, women themselves, compared to men, tend to be less involved in corrupt transactions. There is a growing body of gender and corruption research exploring the relationships between higher

In frontline bureaucracy research, the dominant view holds that frontline workers resist managerial pressure to “blame the poor” by bending the rules based on moral considerations, a practice labeled “citizen agency.” We suggest that frontline responses to managerial pressure are filtered through welfare state regime type. Based on in-depth study of caseworker reasoning in Sweden and Denmark, we find a “structural problem explanation” that sees reasons for clients seeking support as rooted in the structures of society—not in the individual client. We find and present two narratives hitherto not problematized in frontline bureaucracy research: the “statesperson” and the “professional.”

Researchers have studied the impact of different welfare state regimes, and particularly family policy regimes, on gender equality. Very little research has been conducted, however, on the association between different family policy regimes and children's well-being. This article explores how the different family policy regimes of twenty OECD countries relate to children's well-being in the areas of child poverty, child mortality, and educational attainment and achievement. We focus specifically on three family policies: family cash and tax benefits, paid parenting leaves, and public child care support. Using panel data for the years 1995, 2000, and 2005, we test the association between these policies and child well-being while holding constant for a number of structural and policy variables. Our analysis shows that the dual-earner regimes, combining high levels of support for paid parenting leaves and public child care, are strongly associated with low levels of child poverty and child mortality. We find little long-term effect of family policies on educational achievement, but a significant positive correlation between high family policy support and higher educational attainment. We conclude that family policies have a significant impact on improving children's well-being, and that dual-earner regimes represent the best practice for promoting children's health and development.

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