Suchergebnisse

This article applies the Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier "governance by conditionality" framework to public sector reform in a European Union (EU) country subject to implicit rather than explicit conditionality in the context of severe fiscal consolidation. It analyses the reform programmes of the governments that alternated in power in Italy over 2011–2015, focusing on three major areas of public sector reform – fiscal consolidation, labour market reform and liberalization – in the context of the Country-Specific Recommendations–National Reform Plan (CSR-NRP) cycle. We show that the EU has influenced governance (budget institutions and the governance structure of the NRP process) as well as the content of reforms. These results are consistent with the Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier framework regarding the importance of external incentives in explaining adoption and implementation of reforms. Our findings confirm not only the importance of material conditions and their credibility in explaining the fit between EU recommendations and domestic reforms, but also the significance of the strategic usage of Europe by domestic policy makers, which has become more important as the legitimacy of the EU has decreased among voters. We conclude with some reflections on the implications of our research for the ongoing debate on the reform of the European Semester, in particular with regard to the question of how to ensure a higher fit between EU recommendation and domestic policies.

AbstractThe growing complexity of parliamentary ethics regulation adopted over the last decades makes the systematic examination of its nature and the rationales underpinning regulatory choices an important endeavor. In this paper we introduce conceptualizations and measurements of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed toward assuring the impartial and unbiased decisionmaking of national parliamentarians. We distinguish the strictness of rules, the nature of enforcement, sanctions, and transparency requirements as core elements defining COI regimes. Applying our framework to 27 European democracies, we select two cases for in‐depth analysis in which legislators chose very different solutions in response to growing pressures to regulate themselves, to inductively explore the drivers underpinning the choice of COI mechanisms: the United Kingdom, which adopted a highly transparency‐oriented regime, and Belgium, which adopted a highly sanction‐oriented COI regime. Echoing neo‐institutionalist perspectives, the longitudinal analyses indicate how the two democracies' different institutional environments shape distinct answers to similar functional pressures.

This book presents a variety of perspectives on the phenomenon of political and economic corruption-and the link between them-through focused and theoretical analysis. While grounded in the intellectual tradition of classical writers such as Edmund Burke, the volume presents an updated profile of corrupted practices in the contemporary world.