No sex scandals please, we're French: French attitudes towards politicians' public and private conduct

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter

The determinants of public trust in English local government: how important is the ethical behaviour of elected councillors?

One of the most difficult and under-examined issues in integrity research is understanding whether regulatory interventions designed to improve the ethical conduct of public bodies actually have any effect on public trust. In this paper, we present the results of research which has sought to unpack this issue. Drawing on a large-scale public survey and case study analysis of nine local councils in England, the research examined the relative importance of ethical conduct (whether elected councillors displayed good behaviour) on public trust in local government. We found that contextual factors (such as the size of the population and its social and ethnic diversity) and the ethical standards and behaviour of councillors were among the more important determinants of public trust. The most important variable in explaining levels of public trust was how a council performed

Why it matters to keep asking why legislatures matter

Legislative scholars are very good at explaining and analysing what legislatures do and how they do it. But the why question – why legislatures do what they do and why they matter – is often taken for granted or not raised at all. Our objective in this paper is to focus attention back onto the ‘why’ question and to explore the grounds upon which legislative scholars, and others, might be encouraged to reconsider this basic question. In seeking to coax a reconsideration of the importance of legislatures, we direct attention towards processes of legitimation and why legislatures are invested in such processes across the world in the modern era. If, as we argue, an answer to the question of why legislatures matter is to be grounded in processes of legitimation, then deficiencies in those processes or the questionability of those processes also expose the contingent nature of such an answer