Governmental ethics selfregulation: norms, oversight and enforcement

Governmental ethics regulation has expanded in recent years both as a reaction to a perceived decline in trust caused by recurrent integrity scandals involving cabinet members and as part of a broader effort to strengthen the ethical context in which democratic governments operate. In recent years, countries have gone at great lengths in regulating governmental ethics, by setting standards of conduct to its members through hard and soft law instruments and institutionalising mechanisms to oversee and enforce those standards. Whilst all surveyed democracies have mechanisms of collective and individual political responsibility in place, there has been a shift towards more managerial disciplinary proceedings through the creation of dedicated ethics bodies. To understand these developments, this paper provides a mapping of the regulatory measures aimed at promoting integrity standards for cabinet members adopted in 14 European democracies by focusing on three key regulatory dimensions – norms, oversight, and enforcement mechanisms. The paper concludes that the effectiveness of governmental ethics regulation depends on a variety of compliance conditions, including the awareness and appropriation of ethical standards by office holders, the efficacy of oversight and enforcement mechanisms, and a dissuasive sanctions framework. Consequently, norm-setting has shifted from etiquette regulation based largely on informal and unwritten norms to edict regulation, relying mostly on “an institutionalized system of standards, investigation and sanction” (Atkinson & Mancuso, 1992: 3). Ethical norms providing guidance proscribing unethical conduct and promoting good behaviour within organizations have become more complex and larger in scope covering more and more areas, such as political financing, asset and interest disclosure, gifts and hospitality, lobbying and the management of daily conflicts of interest. Oversight and enforcement have also changed substantially. New ethics bodies have been created, with multiple combinations of oversight and enforcement functions. This is particularly notorious in parliaments, which have, more than political parties and executives, been adopting these bodies (Coroado & de Sousa, forthcoming). There is a tendency for compliance-based approaches to integrity and a shift towards the externalisation of control, in some cases leading to a dysfunctional multiplication of entities and a diffusion of responsibility. Studies on the regulation of political ethics have focused mainly on parliaments and the nature and scope of norms adopted (Blomeyer, 2020; Bolleyer et al., 2020). Less attention has been paid to the oversight and enforcement capacity of ethics regimes, i.e., how ethics bodies are designed and how they operate. The regulatory landscape is highly fragmented (Demke et al., 2020) and their institutional design may vary significantly in terms of powers, composition, scope of action and even placement in the regulatory system. Their placement in the system also dictates their dynamics with the regulatees – the MPs at the individual level – and the institution they are integrated in – parliament. Building on the literature on ethics management, corruption control and regulation, this article looks at the institutional design of parliamentary ethics regulators and the way they operate. First, it explores the literature on parliamentary ethics systems to identify the gaps on the study of ethics bodies. Second, it explores the literature on regulatory agencies to look for standards that may guide our institutional analysis. Thirdly, it offers an overview of the variety of integrity regulators in European parliaments to then move to an in-depth analysis of four cases: France, Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.