ANTICORRP

The central objective of ANTICORRP was to investigate and explain the factors that promote or hinder the development of effective anticorruption policies and impartial government institutions. ANTICORRP directly addresses the objective in the Work Program by examining what the causes of corruption are, how corruption can be conceptualized, measured and analysed, what the impact of corruption on societies is and how policy responses can be tailored as to deal effectively with this phenomenon.

The starting point for this project was the following: The knowledge about the very negative impact that corruption has on a great number of factors that are important for human well-being (economic prosperity, population health, life satisfaction, gender equality, social trust, political legitimacy, etc.) is now well established. At the same time, knowledge about how corruption can be successfully fought by political means is much less developed.

While this project concentrated on corruption in Europe, ANTICORRP also had a global scope. The project identified general global trends concerning corruption and select ‘over performing’ and ‘under-performing’ countries in terms of their progress towards less corrupt governance regimes and conduct more detailed qualitative analyses of these cases.

The project included participants from anthropology, criminology, economics, gender studies, history, legal studies, political science, public policy and administration and sociology at twenty-one units in sixteen European countries. Research was conduced using a various set of methods including historical case-studies, large-scale surveys and ethnographical approaches.

The project strived to ensure that the research findings were spread to policy makers and the general public by using high profile multimedia and data visualisation tools as well as research-to-policy workshops at different levels and for different target audiences.