Kaye, Robert P. --- "Reluctant Innovators: Regulating Conflict of Interest within Washington and Westminster" [2005] ELECD 359; in Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark (eds), "Regulatory Innovation" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Regulatory Innovation

Editor(s): Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845422844

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Reluctant Innovators: Regulating Conflict of Interest within Washington and Westminster

Author(s): Kaye, Robert P.

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

3. Reluctant innovators: regulating
conflict of interest within Washington
and Westminster
Robert P. Kaye

INTRODUCTION
This chapter deals with an age-old low-technology risk: the danger that
private interests will subvert the official actions of elected legislators. There
is nothing new about this issue: the English Parliament grappled with cases
of conflict of interest over a century before the founding of the United
States, with both a Lord Chancellor and a Speaker of the House of Commons
expelled for corruption in the seventeenth century.
Moreover, this chapter concerns two institutions ­ the British House of
Commons and the United States Congress ­ that might be thought by
outsiders to be insular, self-serving and conservative to the point of reac-
tionary. The term `regulatory innovation' can convey notions of newness,
modernity, radicalism and originality. Regulatory change in Congress and
in Parliament has frequently been characterized by the very opposite char-
acteristics. Yet, occasionally, there has been genuine innovation. From an
international perspective, ethics regulation in Washington and at
Westminster is relatively advanced compared with other national legisla-
tures. Prolixity, reluctance and back-sliding, it would appear, are endemic
to legislatures.
Moreover, while second-order change ­ the application of new technol-
ogy to the problem ­ is the most common manifestation of innovation, there
can also be third-order change where the underlying rationale for regulation
changes, with or without change in formal regulatory structure. Where this
is sufficient to amount to a revolution in conceptual world view, we can talk
of a ...