Women in politics are targets of harassment, intimidation, and abuse. Violence affects women in all aspects of their life and parliaments are not immune to this problem. Beyond individual suffering, gender-based violence interfere with women’s right to participate in political life and undermines the representativeness of political institutions. What are parliamentary institutions of the EU and EU member-states doing to address this? Despite growing international recognition, the adoption of specific policies to tackle the issue within parliamentary institutions is insufficient. Drawing on a framework that combines the literature on public ethics regulation and feminist institutionalism, we compare the measures to prevent and detect gender-based violence in EU27 parliaments and the European Parliament. The data shows lack of recognition of the issue in almost half of the European parliaments. The variety of categories of parliamentary personnel and the complexity that results from differences in their legal status make internal parliamentary policies fragmented, with different procedures for different groups, and ultimately incomplete. Harassment is typically understood as a workplace hazard, rather than an issue of political equality and representation, with the vast majority of parliaments excluding members of parliament from their protective measures. The ideal of gender-sensitive parliaments is still far away.

This article applies the concept of transaction to the process of policy transfer, through the case of conflict of interest regulation in France, using archives, documentary sources, and interviews with stakeholders. It contributes to the literature on policy translation by clarifying the role of contingency , which remains underspecified. It shows that timing matters in two ways: it affects actors' ability to open a policy window, and it ultimately affects problem definition and future implementation instruments and practices. It explores the construction of the situation as a scandal, making it necessary to adapt transferred ideas to the political context, where a “shock of moralization” was seen as necessary. It also offers an opportunity to enrich the scholarship on policy transaction with an application to transnational policymaking, where problem definitions and policy solutions are imported from elsewhere and where foreign or transnational actors contribute to the co-construction of actors and issues.

This article applies the concept of transaction to the process of policy transfer, through the case of conflict of interest regulation in France, using archives, documentary sources, and interviews with stakeholders. It contributes to the literature on policy translation by clarifying the role of contingency, which remains underspecified. It shows that timing matters in two ways: it affects actors' ability to open a policy window, and it ultimately affects problem definition and future implementation instruments and practices. It explores the construction of the situation as a scandal, making it necessary to adapt transferred ideas to the political context, where a "shock of moralization" was seen as necessary. It also offers an opportunity to enrich the scholarship on policy transaction with an application to transnational policymaking, where problem definitions and policy solutions are imported from elsewhere and where foreign or transnational actors contribute to the co-construction of actors and issues.

By analysing the policy process leading to the introduction of interest registers in France and Sweden, this article argues that their use as a policy instrument was crucial for acknowledging and defining conflict of interest as a problem. It challenges rationalist approaches to public policy that focus on how the adoption of policy solutions follows the identification of policy problems, instead, favouring the acknowledgement of how problems and solutions can exist independently. To identify how interest registers became a preferred policy solution, the article traces how policies from the UK and US were integrated in the global anti-corruption toolkit in the 1990s and subsequently adopted in France and Sweden in the 2010s. It uncovers the sequencing of events, and, specifically, the evolution of public discourse on conflicts of interest around the adoption of public interest registers. It shows that interest registers contribute to (re)define the problem of conflict of interest in new contexts of adoption. The sequencing of events suggests that the problem of conflict of interest was rarely used before the instrument’s adoption and, what is important, did not have a clear ‘stabilised’ shared meaning. Interest registers thus give reality to the problem and modify its definition. By establishing which interests are to be declared in standardised forms, interest registers define new ‘risk areas’ for corruption. They also convey the idea that the problem relates to an asymmetry of information between elected officials and voters that can be corrected through transparency measures, shifting the locus of problem-solving responsibility to the public.

This article traces the journey of France towards an institutionalization of parliamentary ethics. Since the 1980s, French parliamentarians have adopted a series of laws creating institutions and instruments to control their finances and regulate their conduct, most often in reaction to political scandals. This case study is based on the analysis of parliamentary archives, administrative documents and semi-structured interviews with actors involved in the regulation of parliamentary ethics. The article shows that parliamentary ethics in France has been transformed over the last thirty years, from a prohibition-based regime focusing on a priori bans and wealth control to a regulatory regime introducing disclosure obligations and ethical counsel. Parliamentary ethics regulation in France also evolved from a system of self-regulation to a system of co-regulation, with the creation of several oversight institutions and a move towards further externalization since the 2010s. The multiplication of oversight institutions and mechanisms, while strengthening control over parliamentarians' conduct, however resulted in the fragmentation of parliamentary ethics oversight, rendering the system overly complex. Lastly, the article argues that, while the French parliamentary ethics regime remains largely compliance-based, relatively few parliamentarians have actually been sanctioned for ethical violations.

The search for a universally acceptable definition of corruption has been a central element of scholarship on corruption over the last decades, without it ever reaching a consensus in academic circles. Moreover, it is far from certain that citizens share the same understanding of what should be labelled as 'corruption' across time, space and social groups. This article traces the journey from the classical conception of corruption, centred around the notions of morals and decay, to the modern understanding of the term focussing on individual actions and practices. It provides an overview of the scholarly struggle over meaning-making and shows how the definition of corruption as the 'abuse of public/entrusted power for private gain' became dominant, as corruption was constructed as a global problem by international organizations. Lastly, it advocates for bringing back a more constructivist perspective on the study of corruption which takes the ambiguity and political dimensions of corruption seriously. The article suggests new avenues of research to understand corruption in the changing context of the twenty-first century.

The chapter offers an overview of the relationship between media and corruption. In a critical review of literature on the role of journalism in curbing corruption, different models and mechanisms are outlined. By presenting numerous studies, it is argued that press freedom helps to reduce corruption, and action should be taken in favour of policies for information accessibility, protection of journalists and media independence. The issue of media capture, and how corrupt environments influence the structure and role of news media, is also considered. A section is dedicated to how media contribute to the social construction of corruption: case studies from multiple countries are compared, showing how corruption is framed in different contexts. Finally, directions for future research are suggested, including further theoretical elaboration on the relationship between media framing and public policies in relation to corruption, and research on the role of ICT in relation to journalism and corruption.

Cet article compare deux programmes de réforme de l’État promus par les institutions internationales (principalement Banque mondiale et OCDE) à l’orée du xx e siècle : la nouvelle gestion publique et la lutte contre la corruption, et interroge les rapports qui existent entre eux, à partir d’une analyse des archives de ces organisations et d’entretiens avec des fonctionnaires internationaux. Aborder ces programmes de réforme sous un angle cognitif, tout en tenant compte des instruments d’action publique qui cristallisent ces idées en actions, permet de comprendre où ces programmes de réformes développés et diffusés par des institutions internationales se recoupent et où ils s’éloignent. Cette double approche permet de montrer que, malgré un discours de différenciation, les programmes de prévention de la corruption (notamment par la promotion de l’éthique publique) sont souvent présentés comme une réponse aux dérives et omissions de la nouvelle gestion publique – la première est pourtant bien l’héritière de la seconde, reproduisant le même appareillage théorique du Public Choice et des outils néo-managériaux similaires en vue d’atteindre un objectif nouveau.

This chapter is interested in the politics of anti-corruption and more specifically at the role of scandals in the evolution of norms, here understood in their most formal sense. Scandals, as governance failures made visible, represent critical conjunctures where policymakers are pushed to regulate themselves. The external shock of the corruption scandal and the public demands that it generates create an opportunity to introduce new mechanisms to control the behavior of political representatives that would have been unlikely outside of these circumstances. Combining Kingdon’s multiple streams with an institutionalist approach, this chapter looks at the evolution of French elected officials’ financial disclosure obligations to interrogate the impact of specific events on anti-corruption norms.

Since corruption became established as a global public problem, the attention of academics as well as NGO experts and officials from international organisations has moved from exploring “why it is a problem” to debating “what works and what does not” in combating it. Faced with the seeming failure of anti-corruption policies and consistently high levels of public distrust, many players in the field have reassessed their approach. In the mid-2010s, the OECD considered it “timely” to update its approach to preventing corruption, leading to its new 2017 Recommendation on Public Integrity, replacing the 1998 OECD Recommendation on Improving Ethical Conduct in the Public Service. The OECD’s move from ethics to integrity is not radical, as many elements of the new recommendation were implicit in its existing work on ethics. It does, however, reflect a shift, introducing the individual into the equation, and marks the organisation’s ambition to move outside its comfort zone and engage new audiences in its “whole-of-society” approach. This blog presents the main dimensions of this transition to integrity and suggests some elements to elucidate the shift.

Cet article s'intéresse à la construction sociale des scandales de corruption par la presse écrite française, du point de vue de la définition de la corruption comme problème public. Sur la base d'un corpus de 307 articles publiés entre 2005 et 2015, nous utilisons la théorie du cadrage médiatique pour identifier les principaux cadres interprétatifs de la corruption. Le traitement de la corruption présente généralement la corruption comme le résultat de dérives individuelles et les figures rhétoriques utilisées pour insister sur l'intérêt médiatique du sujet contribuent à (re)présenter la corruption sous l'angle du scandale et généralise fréquemment le problème à l'ensemble d'un groupe social. Bien que la médiatisation de la corruption soit souvent essentielle à la mise sur agenda du problème, la (re)présentation de la corruption dans les médias français, en concentrant notre attention sur les comportements individuels, n'en fait pas nécessairement un problème relevant de la responsabilité politique des pouvoirs publics.