Parliamentary ethics regulation and trust in European democracies
Bolleyer, N; Smirnova, V
Date: 20 March 2017
Article
Journal
West European Politics
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This paper presents a three-dimensional conceptualization of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed towards assuring the impartial and unbiased decision-making of parliamentarians. We distinguish and separately measure (based on a new dataset) COI Strictness, Sanctions and Transparency and show they indeed constitute empirically ...
This paper presents a three-dimensional conceptualization of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed towards assuring the impartial and unbiased decision-making of parliamentarians. We distinguish and separately measure (based on a new dataset) COI Strictness, Sanctions and Transparency and show they indeed constitute empirically separate dimensions of parliamentary ethics regimes adopted in European democracies. To illustrate the usefulness of our indices, we examine the relationship between them and trust in national parliaments across 25 democracies. Unlike our Sanction and Transparency Index, the COI Strictness Index (composed of strictness of rules and enforcement) has a significant and robust negative association with trust, which highlights the importance of disentangling different elements of COI regimes. While future research has to explore the causal relationships between COI regulation and trust, capturing the complexity of COI
regimes in an unbiased fashion and thereby making them comparable across European
democracies is an essential step towards doing so.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0