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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4126)	11/18/2004 6:22:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

I think sometimes it aids in enforcing the more serious stuff, but it also can have a negative effect. Only so much attention and so many resources are going to be put in to tracking down conflict of interests and related scandals. If you have a lot more scandals to investigate (because a mere appearance becomes a scandal) than the resources may be spread thinner. Esp the resource of public attention. Professional investigators may be able to shift through the pile and grab on to what's important but if you have more scandals the public will be less outraged and pay less attention to each one. To the extent the public (and politicians, and "talking heads", and newspaper and blog articles ect.) pay more attention to scandals in general, less is left over for other serious issues. Another problem is that the scandals can really be about regulatory minutiae rather than issues of substance, but this has more to do with the fact that the amount of, and complexity or regulation continues to grow, that it has to do with the more general principles of ethics and investigations. The book apparently also considers a lot of the process of investigating and punishing scandals to be ineffective. I might have to buy the book to comment further. You can only get so much from a short online book review. Tim