Regulating Ethics in Parliaments: Measuring Regime Robustness

• Autor(a) principal: Coroado, Susana
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: de Sousa, Luis
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/57664
• topic: Political ethics; self-regulation; parliament; oversight; enforcement

Ethics regulation in parliaments has grown significantly over the last decades, as a result of political scandals, public outcry, and policy diffusion promoted by international organizations. Ethics regulatory regimes vary according to the focus of the norms (compliance vs. integrity or transparency vs. sanctions) and according to the degree of externalization of oversight and enforcement mechanisms (external to parliament, internal, or mixed). The mere existence of regulation says little about how strong these regimes are. Drawing on original data collected through an institutional checklist of 21 indicators, we develop an Ethics Regulation Robustness Index to measure the scope of norms, the strictness of sanctions, and the powers granted to oversight and enforcement bodies in 17 European parliaments. Our findings suggest that the externality of the oversight and enforcement is not a good predictor of the robustness of the ethics regulations.