Ethics Regulation in Swedish Political Parties

Political parties are indispensable actors in representative democracy, serving as a crucial facilitator of political will and accountability in each step of the chain of democratic delegation: from voters to parliament, from parliament to cabinet, and from cabinet to public administration. However, trust in political parties have been declining across representative democracies and citizens view political parties as one of the institutions most affected by corruption. Ethics management is a potential mechanism for parties who wish to keep, rebuild or even strengthen public trust for wielding power with integrity. Previous research point out that political organisations using ethics mechanisms often respond to scandal and that they tend to favour a compliance approach to ethics. Moreover, these measures are often neither well thought through nor effectively enforced. This may do more harm than good with regards to improving integrity. The literature argues for the importance of combining ethics instruments from compliance approaches with values orientated approaches for effective ethics management. Sweden is good example of a high trust society with high trust in governing institutions but where, as in many other democracies, citizens see conflict of interest and corrupt influence as a salient problem in public governance. Accordingly, political parties must consider how to uphold integrity in order to both secure good internal governance and assure potential voters that they are ethical organisations. Sweden is thus an interesting case of how parties approach this challenge. Moreover, formal ethics management (e.g. obligatory ethics training, ethics as criteria in promotion and hiring decisions, rules to disclose outside interests) has not been as prevalent – although increasingly gaining ground – as more informal approaches (e.g. leaders serving as role models, positive reinforcement). In this paper we study how all Swedish parliamentary parties (eight) use various ethics strategies to uphold ethics and countervail risks for ethics violations. In particular we explore what type of ethics management strategies they use (instruments, processes, and how they position in relation to the values-compliance distinction; and why these measures were introduced or changed). This is done by mapping measures such as existence, scope and detail of party ethics codes, ethics training and dilemma discussions, the use of individual candidate contracts, and the powers and composition of disciplinary bodies. The study will focus on the parties’ national/central organisational level.