During the past decades, levels of political trust, and in particular trust in political parties, have fallen in most cross-national surveys to historical records. A fall in political trust has coincided not only with an increase in scandals associated to the financial probity of parties, party officials and designated candidates, but also a poor record in clarifying what those standards should be and how they ought to be enforced. Empirical research shows that high levels of perceived corruption in a country are associated with low levels of political trust, which in turn affect negatively people’s evaluations of democratic performance. Countries responded to this credibility deficit through a complex mixture of internal and external regulations and supervision governing the ethical conduct of individual and collective political actors. The literature has vastly covered the nature and quality of ethics legislation enforced by external oversight bodies, but little has been said about internal self-regulatory efforts developed by political actors themselves. Since most corruption scandals unveiled in the past decades have been directly or indirectly related to political financing and impropriety by elective officials, it is important to try and understand the mechanisms and processes through which political parties set ethical standards to their members. Using a check-list methodology, we will be mapping internal compliance- and integrity-based self-regulatory efforts adopted by political parties with parliamentary representation across the EU28 democracies. We then explore the drivers underpinning such efforts, as well as country and ideological spectrum variation.

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