This work package is led by the University of Perugia. It undertakes a survey on the normative constraints of corruption. It investigates how corruption is reflected in the media, what trends emerge in corruption coverage and how are they related with international and national strategies against corruption. Mass media themselves (as well as individual journalists) may be corrupted or play an active role in a power game based on instrumentalisation as they may be part of corruption practices and habits. At the same time, the way in which corruption news is covered (or hidden) may foster or delay a culture of legality. When media is captured in systemic corruption it fails to play the key role in accountability that anti-corruption strategies presume.
This work package starts by an overall quantitative content analysis (using the Lexis Nexis database and online newspapers) meant to understand changes in media agendas in the countries involved in this project. It examines the place of corruption on the agenda and how mass media have covered corruption stories and seeks to understand the particular role that journalists play. It then attempts to explain the results by systematically asking these questions to key stakeholders in the form of semi-structured interviews. The questions to be investigated are: How is corruption dealt with in the international, national and regional press? To what extent are corruption scandals on the political level exposed and who gets the blame for them? How partisan is the media coverage of political corruption and is media sufficiently corruption-free to play the accountability role attributed to it by anti-corruption strategies?
This work package provides the first assessment on the vulnerability of the media itself to corruption, explaining under what circumstances the media can play its expected role of bolstering normative constraints. Case studies on corruption involving journalists in different countries are selected and analysed in depth.
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 […]
March 9th 2017 UNIPG and SNS together with ANAC (National Anticorruption Authority) organize a seminar in Rome “It is Necessary to Know Corruption to Fight it. A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Corruption” during which findings from ANTICORRP project will be discussed.
February 27th 2017 UNIPG organizes in Perugia a seminar titled “How difficult is to measure corruption?” to present some of the findings from WP6.
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 School of Communication and Media, jointly with the Slovak Section of Association of European Journalists, is organising a seminar at which they will present results of its research activities related to media coverage of corruption and corrupt practices in the media and among journalists. The seminar, which is funded by the EU FP7 ANTICORRP project, […]
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 […]
As the ANTICORRP project is entering its last year, our researchers are not getting restless. On the contrary: as the results of our research are more and more crystallising, we are organised events across Europe to present our research to the public and explain our view on the fight against corruption. Three of these events […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
The key political roles of the media include providing information, checking the accountability of public figures and authorities, and creating a space for public debate. Among these roles, (un)covering corruption in its various forms is certainly a great task which may also be of great interest for the media. Reporting on occurrences of corruption or […]
The case studies that we conducted are supposed to integrate the previous content analysis of the coverage of corruption and related topics that are part of the deliverable WP6.1. The latter is a typical quantitative study conducted on a very large corpus of data. It has offered, in a comparative perspective, very interesting insights into […]
As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 articles) from the period […]