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This article examines integrity management initiatives designed to introduce more value-based elements in public bureaucracies. Incorporating value-based practices, which emphasize the personal ethical responsibilities of individual public servants, into a hierarchical, rule-based system may present difficult organizational problems. A central issue is to determine whether any change has actually occurred or whether the organization is simply functioning as it did previously. In addition, there are problems of implementation: new value-based initiatives may conflict with the pre-existing system; they may not be adequately reflected in training programs; and there may be differential impacts on departments and agencies. We analyze problems in this new organizational mix in a classical Weberian bureaucracy, the Hong Kong civil service. The findings are based on a 2011–2012 administrative ethics survey of 355 senior public servants, a separate survey of 70 Ethics Officers, and semi-structured interviews with 32 senior public servants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elections under hybrid systems may serve both the conventional purposes of elections in democracies and the legitimating function more commonly found in authoritarian regimes. We evaluate the functionality of the 2004 Legislative Council election in Hong Kong in this regard and analyse the consequences for the political system. We argue that the election weakened rather than strengthened the legitimacy of the system and that it was dysfunctional for the attainment of some of the traditional functions of elections in democracies such as political recruitment, informed debate and the selection of a representative assembly. The election also raised questions about the degree to which bias in the present system towards the election of pro-government, pro-China forces can be sustained in the face of an electoral outcome that shows majority support among voters for democratic candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]