Self-imposed restrictions: understanding why politicians adopt anticorruption policies

Corruption is a pressing global challenge, which imposes substantial costs on the lives of people and businesses, and undermines citizens’ trust in democratic institutions.

Anticorruption reforms and political ethics regulation have also grown dramatically in European countries, but display varying degrees of success.

While scandals, policy diffusion and political will have been advanced as explanations for the success or failure of anticorruption policies, it not yet understood under which specific conditions politicians will adopt anticorruption policies (ACPs) aimed at changing their own status quo and conduct.

If we don’t know the answer to this question, then anti-corruption efforts are doomed to failure.

Unlike previous studies that focused on the implementation of broad anticorruption reforms in the public sector or on the behaviour of participants acting out the part of policymakers in controlled laboratory experiments, the novelty of the SIR project is that it will investigate the specific conditions that surrounded the adoption of each anticorruption law aimed at political officials, namely party funding, conflict of interest and lobbying.

The focus on policies will allow the research to go beyond simple national variations and grasp the conditions under which the policies were adopted in any given time.

This research will be divided into two phases: i) the creation of an original database with the contextual conditions surrounding the adoption of ACPs and the adoption of GRECO recommendations in EU countries; ii) quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of the contextual conditions surrounding the adoption of each specific ACPs dedicated to political office holders.