RESPOND - Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies
Short description
How exactly does political corruption work in today's digital societies? How pervasive is its negative impact on democracy? And how can anti-corruption efforts rebuild people's support for democracy as a regime and encourage their commitment to integrity and their rejection of undemocratic proposals and actions?
RESPOND addresses these key challenges for democracy by investigating the phenomenon of political corruption and undue influence in digital societies and proposing solutions to counter it. The project continues the European Union's efforts to ensure the strength of democracy and restore civil society's confidence in democratic values.
RESPOND does this through a novel interdisciplinary assessment of political corruption, understood here as behaviors and actions that often proliferate in grey areas of legality, leading to biased decision-making and exclusion in the political cycle. Based on a mixed-methods research design, RESPOND examines 27 EU countries and 11 neighboring countries.
The research team at the University of Gothenburg focuses particularly on party financing and lobbying and its potential connections to corruption – how are donations and different income streams of parties linked to corruption? Can donations buy political influence? To assess these questions, the research team collects qualitative insights based on interviews with practitioners, as well as quantitative data on donations to parties and income streams.
Project partners and coordinating partner
The research will be carried out by a consortium coordinated by University of Bologna in Italy with the following partners: Anti-Corruption Research And Education Centre (UKR), Central European University (AT), Government Transparency Institute (HU), University of Gothenburg (SE), Institute for Global Analytics (BG), King's College London (UK), Libera- associazione, nomi e numeri contro le mafie (IT), Sciences Po (FR), Sustainable Communication (BE) with its affiliates Net7 (IT) and Tele Radio City (IT), University of Amsterdam (NL), University of Lisbon (PT), University of Duisburg-Essen (DE), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (IT).