What explains the growth of party ethics self-regulation?

Political parties are highly regulated organizations, both internally and externally, and yet, levels of trust in political parties are systematically low across many countries. Low levels of trust are associated to party related scandals and a poor record in upholding higher ethical standards to their members. Ethical issues not only damage the reputation of political parties, but are a source of internal division and a strategic disadvantage in electoral contexts adverse or sensitive to political corruption. Moreover, the inability to manage the frequency and seriousness of integrity risks within party organisations might threaten its survival, as it happened, for example, with the Italian PSI or the Greek PASOK. While a growing body of theoretical and empirical literature deals with system-level party and party financing regulation, party ethics self-regulatory has been insufficiently addressed and remains a blind spot in existing databases of party politics. This article theorizes and empirically examines what explains political parties’ efforts to address ethical issues within their organizations. We measure party ethics self-regulation efforts through a comparative analysis of two dimensions of ethics self-regulatory efforts: (i) internal codes of conduct or similar regulations and (ii) the internal bodies responsible for their oversight and enforcement. Expanding the Party Ethics Self-Regulation (PESR) database, we provide a comprehensive overview of party ethics self-regulation measures across 90 political parties of 23 countries. In addition to this cross-country mapping, we conducted several interviews with party leaders for a contextual analysis of different regulatory approaches and to take stock of good practices and sensitive issues. We test our hypothesis through a comparative analysis of party ethics self-regulation regimes established in the statutes and codes of conduct of political parties. We expect the extent of party ethics self-regulation to vary according to the ideological positioning, with leftist/progressive parties exhibiting higher degrees of ethics self-regulation due to their relatively greater commitment to the good governance agenda. We also expect fringe parties to have an agenda of densification of ethics self-regulation greater than the conventional parties (at the centre of the ideological spectrum), which may even coincide with either a populist or a good governance discourse. Contrary to Bolleyer et al. (2020), we expect that parties who are legally required to adopt an internal compliance regime, will not expand these formal-legal requirements and keep to a minimum their regulatory efforts. Externally imposed regulations and controls will serve as an excuse for the lack of investment of in internal rules, procedures and mechanisms for improving and upholding higher standards of integrity to its members. The attempts of political parties with parliamentary representation to manipulate extrinsic ethics regulation during the law-making process and favour external supervision reduce internal drives to improve their own ethics’ rules, mechanisms and procedures, and to uphold their own high ethical standards. We further control for legally imposed standards, party age, and country-level degree of democracy.