The Relationship between Political Culture and Ethics Regimes

What is the relationship between political culture and ethics regimes?  This question has two possible meanings.  First, it may suggest that political culture is conducive to ethics reforms and the adoption of codes of conduct and ethics regimes.  Second, it may indicate that the proper functioning of an ethics regime requires the existence of a homogenous political culture, which is of a common set of attitudes and values.

When do the relationships develop? What are the positive and negative impacts of such a relationship? Some scholarly work suggests that the adoption of ethics reforms is not caused by specific political and cultural conditions, but rather represents a response to media investigations, to the disclosure of corruption and other forms of misconduct, and thus falling levels of public trust and to the need to reconstruct voters’ confidence in political institutions.  This does not however mean that ethics reforms are totally unrelated to political culture. 

Some scholars suggest that the success of codes of conduct and other types of ethics reforms depend, to a large extent, on whether the individual to which it applies actually has a common set of political attitudes and values (Skelcher and Snape).  A code of conduct works only if the individuals it is intended to govern have a common understanding of what is appropriate and inappropriate what represents an ethics violation, what should be done to prevent ethics violations, and so on.  Interestingly, empirical evidence collected among British MPs reveals that MPs are far from sharing a homogenous political culture (Mancuso).

For example some posit that a code of conduct assumes a certain level of principle among the individuals to which it applies and a level of transparency in the decision-making process to avoid violations to the code. (Skelcher and Snape, 2001).

Likewise, an assertion is made that MPs can be relieved on for uniform principles of good judgment and thus the House of Commons grants a great deal of discretion among MPs to avoid ethical dilemmas, without consideration for the variety of views represented by the MPs, representing another reason for no correlation between political and cultural ethics. On many important issues there is stark disparity among MPs as to what constitutes acceptable behavior, and many are engaging in activities that others find reprehensible (p.1). (Maureen Mancuso 1993)