Events

Event Description

Loyalty and Courage Under Pressure: Comparing Civil Servants' Responses to Increasing Autocracy with Associate Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas

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This presentation builds upon Prof. Kucinskas' recent book The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy, in which she followed the careers of and gathered interviews of senior federal officials in various government agencies (EPA, DOJ, State Department, USAID, HHS) throughout the first Trump administration. Kucinskas' research revealed that the established civil-service culture––designed to withstand partisan turnovers––was not built for the demands the Trump administration made of the civil servants within that culture. This led to a serious clash between nonpartisan norms and the Administration's escalating demands for personal loyalty, ensnaring senior officials in genuine ethical traps––few of which exhibited overt and discernible moral courage.

This talk expands on The Loyalty Trap by comparing its findings with how public servants in Brazil responded to similar pressures under Jair Bolsonaro's administration. These Brazilian government officials in fact were much more resistant to these pressures and more likely to report or exhibit morally courageous behavior. What about their public-service culture created this atmosphere of moral courage? What is different about the United States' civil service culture that allowed it to erode? Kucinskas will explore these questions and the differing elements in these two cultures of public service that shaped their responses to the loyalty traps they faced.