THE VALUE OF LEGISLATIVE ETHICS LAWS

There are three basic principles of legislative ethics, aimed at guiding legislative behaviour in ways that promote the integrity of legislators and the legislative process:

1. Independence: making decisions based on the merits of the case
2. Fairness: playing by the rules of the legislative institution.
3. Accountability: acting so as to create and maintain public confidence in the actions of individual legislators and the legislative process.

Ethics laws can make a particular contribution by promoting the first and third principle, Independence and Accountability. By placing limits on legislative behaviour in order to discourage lawmakers from acting primarily out of concern for private financial gain, gift restrictions, financial disclosure requirements and other ethics regulations should promote decision-making on the merits.

By exposing and reducing the potential influence of private economic concerns on legislators’ decisions, conflict of interest laws should also promote accountability and public trust in government. At least this is a critical rationale behind the enactment of these laws. But there is also a counterargument that ethics laws actually decrease public trust by generating a sense that all lawmakers are fundamentally untrustworthy and strongly motivated by the pursuit of private gain from public office.

In practice, ethics laws cannot eliminate legislators’ private financial interests (nor should they) or remove the influence of lobbyists on decision-making. However, ethics and financial disclosure laws do help make such interests public and do circumscribe the influence of lobbyists. The fundamental value of ethics laws is that they set clear standards of conduct, defining boundaries, which separate the acceptable from the unacceptable. Ethics laws make clear that legislators must abide by certain guidelines, beyond the criminal statutes’ prohibition on qui pro quo bribery.

The existence of ethics statutes in general forces legislators to be sensitive to ethically challenging situations and to think about kind of conduct is acceptable in ways that they might not otherwise do i.e. if they simply followed their own moral compass. A perennial criticism of ethics laws is that you can’t legislate morality- ethics must come from the heart. This criticism is overly naïve, since the foundation of all law is not to legislate behaviour but to proscribe certain activities and attach penalties to their commission. Benefits accrue from defining what is ethically acceptable for practitioners of a given profession, whether it is medicine, law, engineering, or legislating. Because of the complex roles involved in legislating and the myriad pressures that are placed upon lawmakers, they and the public do benefit from the outlining of clear standards of conduct, from the enunciation of straightforward “should nots’. There are two categories of public officials that are likely to be influenced by laws that restrict outside activities: (1) those who previously lived by the credo that everything is permissible except that which is clearly prohibited and (2) those who did not realize that there was anything wrong with benefiting personally from economic opportunities that arise in the course of public employment.

Ethics laws set clear boundaries on what is acceptable in terms of reaping private benefits from public office.

Ethics in public life is something no legislator today can avoid thinking. Some countries have developed ethics training for their new legislators, others offer continuing education programmes that consider ethics statutes and rules, a discussion of general ethical principles. It is important that public officials and lobbyists have ethics training and thoroughly understand the rules and restrictions associated with lobbying.

Ethics training is a useful tool for strengthening ethics and preventing corruption in public administration if applied together with other tools as part of a comprehensive anti-corruption and pro-integrity policy. Ethics training alone cannot produce sustainable results, especially in countries with high levels of corruption. Ethics training produces observable results only in the long-term.

Political support for ethics training should be demonstrated not only through declarations but also through the practical actions of the leadership, e.g. by setting an example of ethical behaviour and by allocating funds and staff for the implementation of the ethics training programmes. Lack of such "leadership from above" undermines motivation for participation in ethics training and thwarts their positive impact on the behaviour of civil servants and legislators.

Ethics training should be a part of a broader and comprehensive public policy on anti-corruption/integrity and public administration reform, and should be reflected in programmatic documents. However, a requirement to provide ethics training established in policy and programmatic documents alone may not be sufficient to ensure its practical implementation. It is important to have a legislative or other official requirement to deliver and receive integrity training for public officials established in, for example, a Law on Civil Service, an Anti-Corruption Programme, a Code of Ethics and other appropriate regulations.

It is important that there is at least one public agency responsible for the overall framework for ethics training, for central planning, coordination and evaluation of results. Civil service, anti-corruption or ethics agencies can play this role; clear formulation of responsibilities of these institutions should be complemented with proper coordination among them, as well as with other institutions that provide ethics training at central and local levels. In addition, ethics should be integrated in the everyday management of public institutions and managers of public institutions should be required to promote ethics in their institutions.

When there is a limited budget for training programmes, it is important to prioritise the target groups. Targeting also helps to make the training more focused on the practical needs of a specific group of public officials, thus increasing their motivation in participating. Several groups should be targeted for ethics training: all new public officials should be provided with ethics training; senior public officials in management positions and public officials in areas of risk should also be trained on ethics. Compulsory programmes for these target groups are advisable. It is also important to develop ethics training programmes for political/elected public officials. Finally, ethics/HR officers in sector ministries and local level governments should also be trained for their important role in the dissemination of the integrity policy in the organisation.

Assessments of ethics risks and training needs should be carried out in order to adapt the training programmes to the needs of the target groups. Specialised ethics related surveys could be a useful tool for such needs assessment. Close cooperation between the agency that provides the training and the agency that employs the public officials at the stage of developing the training programme is also important in order to adapt the programme to the specific needs of a given institution.

To make the training less formalistic and more practice oriented, and to use the limited time allocated for ethics training to its best, it is very important to apply modern training methods. This can include a combination of theoretical lectures and practical tailor-made case studies and workshops.

It is also recommended to use evaluation methods to assess both the knowledge received by the participants of the training and to identify ways to further improve the training. Finally, countries could consider developing follow-up measures, such as individual ethics action plans for participants in the training programmes, and additional coaching in the workplace to support the implementation of such plans.

It is important to combine the training on ethics rules established in the legislation, ethics codes and other regulations with training on ethical values in order to change attitudes and to strengthen participants’ understanding of why anti-corruption reforms are necessary and possible. It is also important to provide practical guidance on ethical behaviour in situations where official rules contradict traditions or do not provide clear answers on how to behave in concrete situations. It is especially important in countries with high levels of corruption where many grey areas have not yet been addressed by formal rules. While lectures appear appropriate for training on rules, interactive and tailor-made practical methods may be more useful for training on values and ethical conduct in risk situations.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of ethics training is a challenging task. Current evaluation methodologies focus mostly on outputs such as the number of public officials trained. Direct evidence that the training has led to improvement in ethical behaviour among the target group of public officials is usually not available; the overall impact of the ethics training can be assessed only in the long term.

The problem with ethics laws as they currently exist is that they have numerous flaws:

1. The laws are poorly designed largely because they often represent hasty responses to scandals.
2. They violate legislators’ privacy.
3. Related to the violation of privacy and also to the limits they place on outside income opportunities, the laws deter some would-be-legislators from running from office.
4. The laws no only hinder recruitment but also drive some lawmakers out early by creating a politicized and unpleasant environment.
5. They contribute to a negative public conception of legislators, because laws inevitably lead to publicized allegations of violations, and even if these allegations are later proven unfounded, the stigma lingers.
6. They trivialize the concept of politic ethics.