Political adviser misconduct. Scandals and controversies in Westminster systems 2000-2020

This paper (draft chapter) is a study of scandals and controversies that involve political advisers, who work in the offices of ministers and prime ministers in Westminster systems in 2000-2020. There are two fundamental research questions driving this study. First, what are the main scandals and controversies that involve political advisers and how can they be categorized? Second, what explains variability in the different types of scandals and controversies? To answer these questions we assembled a unique dataset on 254 adviser scandals in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom spanning twenty years of government from 2000 to 2020. We used a preliminary extracted typology to categorize the misconduct of political advisers. We then tested a series of hypotheses using a multinomial logistic regression model. The most frequent type of adviser misconduct appears to be public personal attacks against opponents and lack of moderation when expressing themselves in public. This type of misconduct comes just slightly above conflicts of interest and exceeding authority. Public controversies over their political opinions follow. Further down comes leaking, followed by inappropriate use of funds, interference with the administration, corruption and withholding of information.