Parliamentary ethics regulation and trust in European democracies

West European Politics (WEP) covers political and social issues in Western Europe. It has a substantial reviews section and coverage of all national elections in Western Europe.

Its comprehensive scope, embracing all the major political and social developments in all West European countries, including the European Union, makes it important reading for both political practitioners and academics.Abstract:

This article presents a three-dimensional conceptualisation of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed towards assuring the impartial and unbiased decision-making of parliamentarians.

It distinguishes and separately measures (based on a new dataset) COI strictness, sanctions and transparency and shows that they indeed constitute empirically separate dimensions of parliamentary ethics regimes adopted in European democracies.

In order to illustrate the usefulness of these indices, the article then examines the relationship between the three indices and trust in national parliaments across 25 democracies. Unlike the Sanctions and Transparency indices, 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.