Beyond ethics instruments and institutions: an exploratory study of the uses and effects of ethics instruments in the French Parliament

This paper evaluates the French Parliament’s ethics regime through an analysis of the reception of its instruments by the intended policy targets and immediate stakeholders. In France, anti-corruption policy, ethics instruments and mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest have multiplied in the last decade but have not generated much research let alone evaluation. More specifically, there is currently no research on the uses and effects of these new ethics rules within the French Parliament – nor in most other parliaments. This paper thus offers to explore the ethics policies developed in the chambers of the French parliament through the reception and uses of its instruments by policy targets. It aims to shed light on relation that elected officials, clerks and implementing agents entertain with these policy instruments. To identify the objective (effects of the policy) and subjective dimensions (perception and appropriation) of this policy, it uses a methodological framework that combines an elite prosopography, an analysis of parliamentarians' discourse in the chamber and interviews with the target population of the policy as well as other key stakeholders as outlined above.