Since 2013, an annual inventory has been made of which Dutch politicians end up in what kind of integrity affairs.
Outcome
With a view to the 18 March municipal elections, we analysed the integrity affairs that played out in municipalities over the past four years. There were 170 in total, in 108 municipalities. This means that almost a third of all municipalities had to deal with an affair.
Among large municipalities, it was almost half, among medium-sized ones a third and among small ones almost a fifth.
Local parties had the most problems: 71 affairs, followed by CDA with 29 and VVD with 21.
Private misconduct
The largest category among municipalities was private misconduct, with 40 cases. With 39 cases, 'incompatible functions and ties' (conflict of interest) came second. After that, undesirable behaviour was the biggest problem with 36 affairs, followed by misuse and manipulation of information.
Political Integrity Index
The PII is a collaboration of public administration scholars Leo Huberts and Leonie Heres of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with professor of business ethics and integrity management Muel Kaptein (Earsmus University Rotterdam) and investigative journalist Bart de Koning. This is the thirteenth year that the Political Integrity Index has been published. Follow the Money has been publishing the PII since 2023. In total, we counted 702 integrity affairs since 2013, an average of about 54 per year.
The PII shows a fairly stable picture over the years, with an average of about one affair per week. It is not getting worse, but unfortunately not better either. This raises the question of whether all the attention paid to integrity, screening and regulation in recent years has finally led to substantial improvement.
FTM's article can be read here (behind paywall).