Legitimacy means more than a grudging acceptance of the inevitable.3 The word suggests at least confidence and respect and, at times, even warmth and… - John Rohr

REGIME VALUES. An expression used frequently in public administration literature to denote the fundamental principles of a polity which, ordinarily, should guide administrative behavior. Although the term applies in principle to any polity, de facto it appears almost exclusively in literature focused on the United States. The expression entered the public administration literature in the first edition of this author’s Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values.

The word "regime" is not used in the journalistic sense of the "Carter regime," or the "Reagan regime," and so on. Rather it is simply intended as the best English equivalent of what Aristotle meant by a "polity." More specifically by the American "regime," I mean the fundamental political order established by the Constitution of 1789.

Administrators should use their discretionary power in order to maintain the constitutional balance of powers in support of instilling individual rights.