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Since the early 1990s, a series of major scandals in both the financial and most especially the political world has resulted in close attention being paid to the issue of corruption and its links to political legitimacy and stability. Indeed, in many countries - in both the developed as well as the developing world - corruption seems to have become almost an obsession. Concern about corruption has become a powerful policy narrative: the explanation of last resort for a whole range of failures and disappointments in the fields of politics, economics and culture. In the more established democrac

Ceva and Ferretti have written an important book on how we should understand political corruption, which they argue entails a public official acting in their institutional capacity as an officeholder but pursuing an agenda that cannot be justified by the specific mandate of their role. Their definition, in stressing the relational nature of political corruption, underpins their argument that its wrongfulness must be understood as a breach of interactive justice and addressed from within. Only by ensuring that individual public officeholders remain accountable and mutually answerable for their conduct (because institutions are constituted by individuals who have interactive duties to their colleagues) can the threat of political corruption be meaningfully addressed. Office accountability as the core duty of officeholders, to be exercised through the practice of answerability, is crucial to developing a meaningful defense against the risk of corruption within organizations and institutions. The central argument of Ceva and Ferretti's book is both powerful and persuasive and makes a significant contribution to the literature on identifying and tackling political corruption.

Although there has been a significant increase in research on the phenomenon of corruption over the last quarter-century, there is little evidence that this has resulted in effective policy interventions, nor in any significant reduction in its scope and extent. This article argues that three main reasons account for this failure to develop effective anti-corruption measures. First, the dominance of economistic analyses of the role of incentives in decision-making has given rise to proposed institutional fixes that are too abstracted from reality to gain purchase. That dominance was partly prompted by a misplaced assumption that market-based liberal democracies would become the modal regime type following the collapse of communism. Second, an emphasis on the nation state as the primary unit of analysis has not kept pace with significant changes in how some forms of corruption operate in practice, nor with the changing nature of states themselves. Third, different types of corruption are insufficiently disaggregated according not just to kind and form, but also to the locations in which they occur (sectoral, organisational, geographical), the actors involved, and the dependencies that enable them. This reflects an overuse of the term 'corruption' in both academic literature and policy recommendations; insufficient attention is paid to what exactly is being addressed and ultimately, the notion of corruption, without adjectives, is a poor guide both to analysis and to policy prescription.

Résumé Notre article porte sur la gestion de l'intégrité dans la vie publique actuelle au RU. Malgré le niveau d'intégrité traditionnellement élevé dans la fonction publique, d'aucuns soutiennent depuis peu que l'approche britannique ressemble à un édredon en patchwork, composé de fonctions institutionnelles mal définies, d'une indépendance discutable et d'idées contestées sur le meilleur moyen de diffuser et de maintenir la pratique conforme à la déontologie. Dans cet article, nous examinons la manière dont l'esprit de service public (ESP), qui met l'accent sur les codes de conduite informels et sur l'intégrité morale, a évolué dans le cadre des changements systémiques plus vastes opérés dans le style de la prestation de service public. Nous soutenons que les pressions en faveur de la décentralisation de la prestation de service public sont en contradiction avec les tentatives au coup par coup de centralisation et de codification de la gestion de l'intégrité et les inspirent. Cette dynamique est présentée sur le plan des tensions entre les approches basées sur la conformité et celles basées sur les valeurs en matière de gestion de l'intégrité. Notre article se compose de trois parties. Dans la première, nous décrivons l'évolution l'esprit de service public britannique afin de situer la gestion de l'intégrité dans son contexte institutionnel et structurel. Dans la deuxième, nous analysons les débats académiques récents et les recommandations émises par des organismes majeurs, comme le Comité des normes de la vie publique (Committee on Standards in Public Life, CSPL) et le Comité spécial de l'administration publique de la Chambre des communes (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, PASC). Nous allons voir que les recommandations en faveur de la création d'organes statutaires indépendants de supervision de l'éthique n'ont pas été pleinement mises en œuvre. Dans la troisième partie, nous cherchons à situer l'expérience britannique dans un contexte plus large. Ce faisant, nous réfléchissons à des moyens de comprendre la notion de gestion de l'intégrité et son application dans le cadre de l'expérience britannique et au-delà. Remarques à l'intention des praticiens Dans le présent article, nous examinons les tensions qui existent entre les approches basées sur la conformité et celles basées sur les valeurs en matière de gestion de l'intégrité au Royaume-Uni. Je cherche à comprendre dans quelle mesure les approches basées sur les valeurs sont liées à l'existence et à la reproduction de ce qu'on appelle la « notion de service public ». Tandis que cette notion a été remise en cause par les réformes associées au nouveau management public, une série de scandales dans le secteur public ont donné lieu à l'adoption de réponses davantage basées sur la conformité. Le principal défi à relever pour les personnes chargées de définir les approches en matière de gestion de l'intégrité consiste à concilier les valeurs fondamentales à la base de l'esprit de service public et les mécanismes d'imputabilité que l'on peut évaluer sur la base d'indicateurs de rendement mesurables.

This article focuses on integrity management in contemporary UK public life. Despite traditionally high standards of integrity in the public service, it has recently been argued that the UK's approach resembles a patchwork quilt of poorly defined institutional roles, questionable independence, and contested notions of how best to disseminate and uphold ethical practice. The article traces how the British public service ethos (PSE), which places emphasis on informal codes of conduct and moral integrity, has evolved within broader systemic changes to the style of public service delivery. It is argued that pressures to decentralize public service delivery sit in tension with, and feed into, piecemeal attempts to centralize and codify integrity management. This dynamic is presented in terms of the tension between compliance-based and values-based approaches to integrity management. The article is structured in three parts. The first traces the evolution of the British public service ethos in order to situate integrity management in both its institutional and structural context. The second addresses recent academic debates and recommendations from key bodies such as the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) and the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC). It is shown how recommendations to create independent statutory bodies of ethical oversight have not been fully implemented. The third part seeks to place the UK experience within a broader context. In doing so, the article reflects on ways in which we can understand the concept and application of integrity management within and beyond the UK experience. Point for practitioners The article discusses the tensions between values-based and compliance-based approaches to integrity management in the United Kingdom. It seeks to explore how the former is closely linked to the existence and reproduction of what has been termed a 'public service ethos'. As that ethos has been challenged by reforms associated with New Public Management, a series of scandals in the public sector has given rise to the adoption of more compliance-based responses. The key challenge for those designing approaches to integrity management is to reconcile the core values which underpin the public service ethos with accountability mechanisms that can be assessed on the basis of measurable performance indicators.

Spain's assumption of the rotating six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU) on 1 January 2010 took place in decidedly unpropitious circumstances. Not only were EU Member States still struggling to adjust to the impact of the financial crisis which had dominated headlines since 2007, but the Spanish Presidency was charged with implementing the organizational restructuring agreed in the Lisbon Treaty that had finally been ratified in December 2009 following a long and controversial process. Any proper assessment of Spain's fourth period in the Presidency of the EU Council must be based on what was actually accomplished, rather than what was said. The rest of this article therefore focuses on what was achieved across the four principal objectives outlined in the Spanish programme. Adapted from the source document.

Interest in the links between corruption and politics has increased
significantly since the early 1990s. Although the public widely sees
corruption as a phenomenon that particularly afflicts the developing
world—as reflected in the growing emphasis placed on anti-corruption
initiatives by such international agencies as the World Bank, IMF,
OECD, and Transparency International—the issue is also attracting
significant attention in established democracies. Politicians, civil
society activists, and media commentators have expressed concerns
about a host of high-profile scandals contributing to a decline of
trust in the political class, whilst a perceived "culture of
corruption" in several of the post-communist countries of
east-central Europe is seen as an obstacle to their full integration
into the European Union. Indeed, corruption has started to become a
powerful policy narrative in many countries, blamed for a host of
shortcomings in democracies and non-democracies alike (Heywood and
Krastev 2006).

This article outlines how three analytical frameworks all help to explain Prime Minister Aznar's seemingly paradoxical decision to back the war in Iraq. Putnam's two-level games explains the Aznar's choice as a "changing of the domestic win set" that is consistent with the second analytical framework of a liberal inter-governmentalist approach as presented by Moravcik. A Waltzian neo-realist focus on state power perceives the war as a "historic opportunity" to bolster Spain's standing in the world, despite prevailing Spanish opinion to the contrary. The author concludes that the challenge now facing Aznar is a constructivist one of changing the inter-subjective identity of both Spaniards & others to promote a revised understanding of Spain's interests & role in the world. References. J. Harwell