The broad objective of ANTICORRP is to investigate and explain the factors that promote or hinder the development of effective anti-corruption policies and impartial government institutions. The specific objectives of the project are to examine what the causes of corruption are, how we can conceptualize, measure and analyse corruption, what the impact of corruption on societies is and how policy responses can be tailored as to deal effectively with this phenomenon. Through this approach we seek to advance knowledge on how corruption can be curbed in Europe and elsewhere. Special emphasis is laid on the agency of different state and non-state actors to contribute to the fight against corruption. Our findings will provide a basis for making recommendations concerning the formulation and implementation of anti-corruption policies at local, national and European levels.
ANTICORRP will make a contribution to the Stockholm Programme in the field of justice, liberty and security, namely to examine how new mechanisms can both help to monitor the success of anti-corruption policies and enhance the participation of non-state actors and thus social accountability in general. ANTICORRP seeks to do justice to the high policy-relevance of this research topic by interacting with important stakeholders during the project and ensuring that our findings have a significant impact on policy debates also beyond the completion of the project itself.
The main objectives of ANTICORRP are:
1) Propose an encompassing yet precise definition of corruption that clearly differentiates corrupt actions from other types of criminal or ethically problematic actions.
2) Create a panel data-set of indicators allowing the tracing of corruption levels over time by country and region through identifying new indicators documented in the project with established, perception-based ones.
3) Engage in historical and contemporary case study research and qualitative comparisons across cases to explain why countries reach different equilibria with regard to government accountability and the control of corruption.
4) Explain governance regime change as documented by our time series through global models developed through quantitative comparative analysis.
5) Conduct an extensive survey on monitoring corruption and quality of governance that documents the diversity of contemporary governance landscapes, regulatory frames and anti-corruption strategies in the EU and in countries neighbouring the EU.
6) Document the impact and cost of corruption through a variety of case studies across the globe.
7) Provide the first systematic study of the impact of EU funds on the governance of recipient countries.
8) Investigate the success or failure of a significant number of anti-corruption ‘leaders’ in relation to their empowering contexts.
9) Investigate the success or failure of a significant number of anti-corruption projects and analyse what explains the variation in outcomes.
10) Disseminate the findings of the project through academic articles, edited books and policy papers.