The ethical decision making in public administration: A research in Sakarya province

The decision-making process in public administration is often complex and multidimensional. In today's world where public trust in the public sector is being debated, the ethical dimension of the decisions of public officials who serve as decision-makers has become more questioned. Ethics as an independent philosophical discipline, which has frequently been the subject of debates on what it is and how it should be grounded, is the main issue of this study. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the ethical decision-making tendencies of public officials who serve as decision-makers in local governments. The theoretical part of the study focuses on the conceptual and theoretical framework of the concepts of decision, decision making and ethical decision making. Ethical decision-making models are examined through the classification of normative and behavioral ethical decision-making models. Normative ethical decision-making models are frameworks that provide decision makers with guidelines to help them make ethical choices. They aim to determine what is "right" and "wrong" in a situation, regardless of individual preferences or outcomes, and provide a systematic approach to analyzing ethical dilemmas and determining the most ethically correct course of action. Behavioralist models of ethical decision-making examine decisions on the basis of ethical behavior and claim that decision-makers are influenced by environmental and individual factors in the decision-making process. The practical part of the study is based on the aforementioned classification. In order to collect data for the application part of the study, a survey method, which is one of the quantitative data collection methods, was used. This thesis reveals that the ethical decision-making tendencies of public officials who serve as decision-makers in local governments are not clearly weighted on a model, and that their decision-making behaviors sometimes exhibit tendencies in accordance with normative and sometimes behavioral ethical decision-making models.