Measuring and Explaining the Robustness of Party Ethics Self‐Regulation

Over the past two decades, political parties have undertaken a series of intra‐party reforms aimed at reinforcing ethical standards and restoring public confidence. These regulatory developments have been insufficiently studied and remain a blind spot in the literature. The purpose of this article is to explain, drawing on existing theories of regulation, not only why political parties engage in ethics self‐regulation, but also why the robustness of party ethics self‐regulation (PESR) varies across 241 parliamentary parties in 34 countries. For that, we will make use of an updated version of a recently developed dataset which congregates public information on self‐regulatory efforts developed by political parties to address ethical issues within their organizations. Our results suggest that intra‐party ethics reforms are primarily driven by legal tradition, strategic incentives, and risk exposure.