Ethics on the Edge: Outlier Legislators, Political Crises, and Sanctioning Dynamics in the Israeli Knesset (1984–2024)

The institutional behavior of legislators in plenary sessions and committees has been well-studied, but their ethical conduct and parliaments’ responses to it have been largely overlooked. The study seeks to fill this significant research gap by offering a comprehensive analysis of the Israeli Knesset’s Ethics Committee decisions from its establishment in 1984 through July 2024. Based on an original dataset of 224 decisions that resulted in sanctions, it introduces an initial model that distinguishes between external variables (critical events, affective polarization, and populist rhetoric) and internal variables (outlier legislators, chairperson seniority, gender, and nationality of committee members). The findings demonstrate that outlier legislators and moments of political crisis are key drivers of severe sanctions, particularly during periods marked by heightened affective polarization. Conversely, committees chaired by senior MKs and including women or Arab members tended to impose more moderate disciplinary measures. The research highlights how parliamentary ethics enforcement is shaped by broader political dynamics and institutional composition. By theorizing the interplay between contextual and structural factors, the study offers a novel framework for understanding ethical oversight in democracies and lays the foundation for comparative inquiries into self-regulated ethics mechanisms in other parliamentary systems.