Regulating ethics in parliaments: a matter of regime robustness

The ethics regulation in parliaments has grown significantly over the last decades, as a result of political scandals, public outcry and policy diffusion promoted by international organizations. Ethics regulatory regimes vary according to the focus of the norms (compliance vs integrity or transparency vs sanctions) and according to the degree of externality of the oversight and enforcement mechanisms (external to parliament, internal or mixed). The mere existence of regulation says little about how strong these regimes are. For instance, norms may be in place, but cover only a reduced scope of conflicts of interest. Similarly, an ethics body may exist, but have a limited mandate or no enforcement powers. The robustness of the regulations in place may also vary across these two frameworks. In the paper, we introduce an Ethics Regulation Robustness Index that measures the scope of norms, the strictness of sanctions and the powers granted to oversight and enforcement bodies in twenty European parliaments. Building on previous methodologies applied to lobbying regulations, our index consists of three dimensions, norms, oversight and enforcement, and 21 indicators. The index was applied to twenty European parliaments and dialogues previous works on parliamentary ethics regimes.