Abstract:

With the effect of its fundamental pillars (i.e. public law and political philosophy), public administration both as a study and a practice is inherently “normative”. It is highly difficult to find a topic in public administration that does not have a normative dimension. In this context, all the students of public administration address normative issues directly or indirectly, deliberately or unintentionally. The following question has been mainly discussed in this paper: “How can a normative issue in public administration be analysed systematically on the basis of empirical data within a methodological framework?” In this paper, this complicated question has been dealt with a special reference to public service ethics in Turkey within the boundaries of the design and findings of the research previously conducted for a different aim by the authors: A normative research on the normative dimension of public service ethics in Turkey (i.e. basic norms and legal-administrative regulations and institutional mechanims based on such norms); an empirical research on the cultural dimension of public service ethics in Turkey (i.e. the cultural strengths and weaknesses of Turkish public administration in combating unethical conducts); and the link between the normative and empirical research.    

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