Misconduct and Whistleblowing in Political Parties: Survey evidence from Sweden

What is the nature of misconduct and whistleblowing in political parties? While there is a large and established literature on the causes and consequences of whistleblowing in many organizational settings, we are yet to understand how these processes work in political parties – organisations that operate at the heart of democracy and are distinctive in their cultural and hierarchical structures. This paper develops expectations for misconduct and whistleblowing in parties from a substantial body of research on whistleblowing from the field of business ethics and supplements this with insights from organizational theory. We then test these expectations in a first attempt to empirically gauge the nature of misconduct and whistleblowing in political parties using a survey of around 1,000 Swedish politicians from the national, regional, and local levels – the Politikerpanel – following the formation of the Swedish government in 2022. The findings generated by this study will give new insight into how frequent misconduct and wrongdoing is in political parties, what the nature of these misconducts are, and what mechanisms are used for addressing them by witnesses and authorities.