Beyond Quid Pro Quo: What's Wrong with Private Gain from Public Office?

The longstanding debate over whether officials should be permitted to profit personally from public office has moved to the center of public discourse in the United States. As the House Ethics Manual put it recently, it is of concern simply when an officeholder “cash[es] in on official position,” regardless of whether his or her official performance was in any way impaired as a result. Although the question of private gain from public office is richly implicative of a number of fundamental issues in political theory—in particular the ongoing controversy over where to draw the borders between private and public as well as the nature of official fiduciary responsibility—it has yet to undergo political-theoretic analysis. In what follows, I examine both the conceptual and normative issues emergent in the debate over private gain from public office.