This work package is led by the Quality of Government Institute and builds on work package 7, exploring both institutional and societal factors considered essential to accountability, and in particular how these interact with one another to curb corruption or, alternately, fail to do so. The work package comprises four interrelated strands exploring these structures and dynamics of accountability. The first of these two relates to the institutions of horizontal accountability, i.e. institutional mechanisms designed to allow political institutions to detect and sanction misdeeds internally and externally, with a focus on bureaucratic autonomy, government transparency and government audit institutions. In order to map these institutional factors, researchers from WP11 conduct a worldwide survey of public administration experts in all countries, to be identified and contacted through professional networks of public administration scholars.
The first strand of inquiry probes the varying effectiveness of these horizontal accountability mechanisms on curbing corruption. The national level data from the expert survey is supplemented by contemporary and historical data for the bureaucratic structure at the sub-national level in EU27, and captures the level of politicization of central, regional and local bureaucracies, the recruitment and promotion systems within the civil service, and the financial conditions for those working in the civil service. This is done in collaboration with work package 5.
The second strand investigates the interaction between horizontal mechanisms of accountability and the efforts of non-state actors in holding government accountable. Societal accountability, defined as the actions of domestic and international actors from outside the immediate sphere of the state to hold government accountable, may enhance the effectiveness of anticorruption measures, and institutional configurations may strongly affect the success of anti-corruption campaigns by non-state actors. This second strand builds both on the survey as well as on case studies to further elucidate whether and how transparency laws, bureaucratic structures, and other aspects of the accountability system enable international and domestic non-state actors to promote accountability.
The third strand of inquiry focuses on approaches to integrity management, looking at tensions between values-based and compliance-based systems. In regard to the former, particular emphasis is placed on civic and ethics education programmes. Key questions include whether changes in institutional design can be divorced from changes in organizational culture; whether the mutual dependence between regulators and the regulated creates particular pathologies; and whether the pursuit of ‘absolute integrity’ undermines government effectiveness.
The fourth and final strand of WP 11 turns its attention to electoral accountability and studies to what extent, in what way and with what consequences political parties politicise the issue of corruption as part of the process of democratic competition. The issue of anti-corruption has gained salience in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and in several countries, political parties campaigning on this particular issue have been electorally very successful. Key examples include the Simeon II National Movement and Citizens for European Development (Bulgaria); Res Publica (Estonia); New Era (Latvia); Smer (Slovakia); Law and Justice (Poland); Freedom and Solidarity (Slovakia); and Public Affairs (Czech Republic). This line of inquiry also explores the efforts and effectiveness of the social movement Without Corruption, the Future Starts Again (Italy) which sought to inject corruption into an election campaign. The research undertaken here attempts to answer the following questions: To what extent and in what way do parties politicise the issue of anti-corruption? Under what conditions do anti-corruption parties emerge and to what extent is their rise linked to levels and perceptions of corruption or the mobilisation of civil society against it? Under what conditions do such parties enter governing coalitions? And, if they do, what is their impact on anti-corruption policies? What are the broader implications of the use of anti-corruption as a tool of political mobilization for anti-corruption policies?
On Wednesday, 22 February, 1-2pm, the FP7 ANTICORRP team at UCL is celebrating the launch of the special issue on “Innovations in Corruption Studies” in the Slavonic and East European Review. The special issue emerges from the research by University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies – a major partner in the FP7 […]
Recording from Athens, 9 May 2016, 14:10 – 15:30. Corruption has by now been recognised as a major policy problem across the world. Governments across the European continent, from Greece to Iceland, are trying to address the issue with different approaches. The recent publication of the Panama Papers again highlighted the varying success of these […]
The conference features Principal Investigators and Project Managers from the V-Dem Institute and the ANTICORRP project and counts amongst its speakers leading scholars on democratization, democracy, good government and corruption from universities across continents such as University of Notre Dame, Boston University, Lund University, University of Gothenburg, Emory University, University of Florida, the Pontifical Catholic […]
Several members of the ANTICORRP consortium will participate in a workshop on issues of gender and corruption, organised at the University of Gothenburg. The aim of this workshop is to bring together internationally recognized scholars for a two-day conference that will lead to the publication of an edited volume. The conference will be organized around […]
Monika Bauhr will speak at the Public Opinion and Foreign Aid Conference 2016 at Essex University.
ANTICORRP was a large-scale research project funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme. The project started in March 2012 and ended February 2017. The full name is Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Challenge of Corruption.
Its central objective was to investigate factors that promote or hinder the development of effective anti-corruption policies.
The project consisted of 20 research groups in 15 EU countries. It was interdisciplinary in nature, and brought together researchers from anthropology, criminology, economics, gender studies, history, law, political science, public policy and public administration.
The project was organised into four thematic pillars, which include 11 substantive work packages.
What factors promote or hinder the development of effective anticorruption policies and impartial government institutions? The ANTICORRP project and the Quality of Government (QoG) invited policy-makers, civil society representatives and academics to a conference in Brussels trying to surmise the final results of the ANTICORRP project. The conference counted among its speakers some of the […]
“Things are moving, things are changing – but they aren’t changing in big steps, they are changing in millimetres” This was one of the conclusions put forward by Drago Kos, Chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery and member of the ANTICORRP Advisory Board. He took part in a roundtable of anti-corruption experts that […]
The V-Dem and ANTICORRP Policy Dialogue Conference achieved exactly what is was set out to do: to create an opportunity for a true dialogue between policymakers and academics, an exchange that both sides were able to benefit from. Our anti-corruptoin researchers used the opportunity to enter a dialogue with representatives from the OECD, SIDA, GIZ, Transparency International and many more.
Recording from Athens, 9 May 2016, 14:10 – 15:30 (EET). Corruption has by now been recognised as a major policy problem across the world. Governments across the European continent, from Greece to Iceland, are trying to address the issue with different approaches. The recent publication of the Panama Papers again highlighted the varying success of these […]
1. Integrity in public life is an essential component in establishing trust between citizens and their governments. However, over recent decades there has been increasing concern worldwide that standards of integrity are in decline. In part, that concern reflects a parallel focus on corruption as a core threat to good governance. The two concepts – […]
This deliverable presents research on the institutional organization of governments and how these affect both horizontal, vertical and societal accountability. Horizontal accountability refers to when government bodies hold other government bodies to account, vertical accountability refers to when citizens hold government accountable through elections, and societal accountability refers to when citizens and civil society associations […]
The research presented in this deliverable covers three types of approaches to mitigating corruption: electoral accountability, civil society mobilization (societal accountability), and top down efforts by a regime to deal with its own corruption. The main findings are: Corruption does not, in contrast to what previous research suggests, always depress electoral turnout, which allows for […]
This deliverable presents all ANTICORRP policy reports that were published throughout the five year project period. While the individual reports can also be found on this website, this deliverable exemplifies the diversity and breadth of the ANTICORRP project and its efforts to compile policy relevant research. Contributing authors are: Acar, M., A. Bozzini, R. Bratu, […]