4 EVIDENCE ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COI POLICIES – TOWARDS BETTER PREVENTION AND LESS COI?
4.1 Conflicts of Interest policies and trust – a complex relationship
Ethics measures are often introduced by politicians with an eye on the perceived problem of decreasing public trust in their own political class. However, the intention of increasing public trust is rarely met (Rosenson 2006, 137). In fact, why do public authorities “feel the need to justify public integrity? The habitual answer goes in order to breed trust amongst citizens (…). However, a commitment to public integrity implies an obligation to disclose the government´s lack of integrity. And this, it should be stressed, is not likely to promote trust in government. Justifying integrity by means of trust, then, produces a paradox. On the one hand, the government´s sincere commitment to integrity entails an obligation to reveal its violations of integrity, which is not likely to increase trust. On the other hand, a government cannot refrain from making these revelations, for that would constitute a violation of the commitment to integrity” (Nieuwenburg 2007, 21).
Most ethics experts think that more rules, even if well managed, may not automatically build more trust. Contrary to this, new rules may even decrease public trust. As Behnke (2005) shows “in spite of the individual rationality of these strategies, the collective irrationality lies in the fact that ever more transparency, ever higher standards and tighter regulations create ever more violations of ethical rules, more scandals and more investigations, thus undermining the legitimacy of the institution and destroying public trust and creating collective costs that far outweigh the individual benefits.” The assumption on the part of the legislators and Members of Government who favour the adoption of new rules and standards is that this will have a positive effect and increase public trust in Government. However, a strong focus on ethics, too strict approaches, too much publicity, and too many rules may also undermine public trust. Therefore, present trends towards the adoption of more rules and policies do not necessarily provide for an efficient response to conflicts of interests, the decline of public trust, and may cause even more cynicism regarding national, European, and political institutions as such.
As trust is a manifold issue, we tried to operationalise the term by testing various variables, asking for opinions related to trust. As such, we found the following relationships between trust and the policy coverage density of EU Member States. However, it needs to be noted that these findings don’t represent statistically significant results, as the number of observed cases would make any generalization vague.
Table 3. The relationship between trust and policy coverage density 1. The higher the policy coverage density, the higher the general trust levels 2. The lower the policy coverage density, the more people believe that bribery and
abuse of power is widespread among politicians (Note: very slight effect!) 3. The lower the policy coverage density, the more people believe that bribery and
abuse of power is widespread among political parties (Note: very slight effect!) 4. The higher the policy coverage density, the more people believe that corruption is
widespread in their respective country
5. The higher the policy coverage density, the more people believe that corruption does not exist in their respective country
6. The higher the policy coverage density, the more people believe that close ties between politics and business lead to corruption (Note: very slight effect!)
7. The lower the policy coverage density, the more people believe that corruption cases are not pursued sufficiently
8. The higher the policy coverage, the more people believe that government compacts corruption effectively
9. The higher the policy coverage density, the more people believe that anti-corruption measures are applied impartially
According to Auby et al. (2014) “the level of public trust in government… impacts the choice of legislation”. It is often thought that countries with lower trust levels have more rules in place than countries with higher trust levels. This is contradictory to our findings.
At first, it might seem the only thing this – admittedly – contradictory table is telling us is that there is no answer to the question if higher policy coverage density leads to more trust in government (as anticipated by many politicians). However, this is not entirely true. For once, trust is only slightly higher, the higher the policy coverage density. Further, the result is influenced by Luxembourg and the Netherlands, the only two countries with high policy coverage density and high trust levels. On the other hand, countries like the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia also have very high policy coverage density but low trust levels. As such, while the general trend might slightly suggest otherwise, a closer look at the cases shows that the majority of countries with very high policy coverage density actually suffers from low trust levels. Harder to explain is, nevertheless, the fact that in these countries’ governments are believed to combat corruption effectively. A logical explanation seems to be that only a few cases are actually considered as corruption and can, thus, be combatted more easily. Importantly, it has also to be noted that high policy coverage density does not suggest a high quality of the implemented rules. As such, enhancing trust by decreasing the number of scandals through ever more rules doesn’t work if the rules are ineffective.
These findings show even more how contested the issue of trust actually is and how differently it can be interpreted.
As all the variables, except the variable for trust in general, stem from the same Eurobarometer data (European Commission 2020), one would expect to find a coherent pattern. The fact that this is not the case does further suggest that the participants of the survey don’t have a coherent opinion themselves. It is also important to note that, while more variables indicate higher trust in countries with higher policy coverage density, correlation is not causation. Our findings show no clear pattern and even if they would, this would not suggest that higher policy coverage leads to more trust. Simply that there is correlation between those two, as the number of cases does not allow for reliable regression analysis. To summarize, our data does not suggest a negative effect of higher policy coverage density on trust, but neither a positive effect. It can, thus, at least be questioned if the objective of increasing trust by implementing more regulation is actually achieved.
However, one should also not overemphasize this explanatory variable. Would deregulate ethics policies and standards increase trust levels? As such, being against more rules and standards is risky – from a political point of view. Overall, ethics policies are becoming more and more politicised. Ethics is slowly emerging as a perfect policy field in electoral campaigns. Politicians can be sure that calls for new initiatives will be applauded by the citizenry because these calls reflect a widespread perception in European societies that levels of corruption and conflicts of interest are increasing, and something must be done.
From the point of view of a Holder of Public Office (and even more of an elected representative, a legislator, or a minister) it would not only be detrimental to be against new or even higher ethical standards. In fact, the call for higher ethical standards and tighter rules of ethics are more and more the subject of election campaigns in many countries.
The downside of this development is that it becomes more difficult to avoid that ethics as a policy issue is abused as moral stigmatisation. More and more politicians use
“accusations of unethical conduct as a political weapon...”(Williams, 1978, 41). Rules of ethics are resources that politicians mobilise to attack and discredit their opponents.
Consequently, ethics are increasingly used as a moral instrument with the aim of denouncing political opponents.
This illustrates how CoI are related to the national context. The level of public trust affects the choice of instrument. However, the solution to the problem is not to deregulate CoI rules and policies to increase public trust. In fact, deregulation would most likely not improve the situation in low trust countries. As such, there is no clear answer to this dilemma.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Because of the limited effects of both compliance-based and value-based approaches, there is growing insecurity about the next strategy to follow and the best regulatory mix, the role of self-regulation, the effectiveness of deterrence mechanisms and sanctions, the quality of regulation and the need for other political, behavioural and economical instruments. As our study show, EU Member States find themselves in a process in which they constantly add more rules, stricter standards, broader definitions and more investments in an emerging ethics bureaucracy. However, outcomes seem to be frustrating.
Results of our survey also largely confirmed the study results of an earlier survey (European Parliament, 2008) which concluded that there is a clear relationship between the nature of administration and the policy coverage density: Countries with a more classical bureaucratic system manage CoI much more detailed by laws and regulations than more private sector like managerial systems who prefer the use of codes of ethics.
However, we find no evidence whether the so-called compliance based-models or the value based-models are more or less effective. Instead, both systems demonstrate various shortcomings in the institutionalization and enforcement of CoI policies. In addition to the above-mentioned study, we also found a clear link between the political situation within a country and the acceptance of CoI. To summarise the main implications of our findings:
Ever more and ever stricter regulation does not enhance the policy effectiveness. However, this does not suggest a pathway for deregulation. The reasons for this may rather be shortcomings in the effective implementation as well as the low quality of the adopted policies. More research is needed to strengthen this conclusion.
For example, the toleration and shortcomings in the implementation and enforcement of CoI are higher in countries with lower ratings in democracy, rule of law, transparency, Good Governance etc. Overall, systems based on Good Governance have lower tolerance levels for unethical conduct. Contrary to this, countries with lower ratings in democracy, rule of law and integrity also have higher levels of acceptability of corruption.
The downside regarding the politicization of ethics policies is that it becomes more difficult to avoid that ethics as a policy issue are abused as moral stigmatisation and abused by populists. Overall, ministers and top-officials are subject to increased public and media scrutiny and an exponential rise of ethical and moral scandals. While it can be doubted that holders of public office have become more unethical as such, generalised and inflated use of the term moral scandal, the increased (digital) media visibility of scandals and the political abuse of moral issues have negative side-effects on trust perceptions. To this should be added the problem that – often - CoI of ministers are tolerated and not enforced.
Overall, conflict of interest policies remain ineffective even if governments slowly establish impressive ethics bureaucracies. As such, ethics policies fill the gap of ever new “unethical”
effects of other Governance logics. If ethics policies and ethical logics are not integrated into other organizational and systemic logics, too much is expected of ethics policies. In fact, Governments and EU administrations are advised to focus on Good Governance policies and on the development of institutional integrity models, considering concepts of organizational justice and fairness.
Still, detecting, managing and measuring CoI policies involves some of the greatest challenges and difficulties in legal, political, organizational, behavioural and administrative sciences. The management of conflicts of interests “is like aiming at a moving target and requires careful and flexible consideration” (Kerkhoff & Overem, 2021, 91). Countries find themselves in a paradox: Whereas politicians must be subject to tough scrutiny and the highest standards, it is nonetheless unrealistic to expect that legal and managerial ambitions solve the ever new emerging CoI issues once and for all (Kerkhoff &
Overem, 2021, 91).
There were a few obstacles that prevented doing full-fledged quantitative research. As such, there is a need for more research that is, quantitatively speaking, more rigorous. The same can be said for critically assessing the relationship between administrative reforms and public ethics. It was not possible to gather data from all 27 EU Member States, meaning it was only possible to work with smaller-n analysis. Hence, more sophisticated regression analyses were not reliable. Also, many of the survey questions were politically sensitive and only a few member states replied. For explorative research, the data allows drawing some interesting conclusions, while it makes proper statistical analysis much harder. The overall goal of this research is not the generalizability but understanding development in the EU Member States.
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