(Anti-)Corruption and Integrity

About

The ECPR Standing Group on (Anti-)corruption and Integrity brings together scholars from different disciplinary, national and cultural backgrounds to further promote and deepen academic knowledge on: (i) corruption, an issue of increasingly significant public and political concern across the globe; (ii) on the strategies and policy solutions that seek to address the problem; as well as (iii) on the evolving concept of public integrity, both as an end in itself and as a corrective to the dominant anti-corruption approaches of the last quarter century that have delivered disappointing results. The perceived stagnation of existing work and approaches, coupled with the ever-increasing recognition that corruption poses a threat to political trust and stability and underlines a growing need to move (anti-)corruption studies in a new direction. There has been a growing number of new developments in this regard, both in policy and research, thereby making the foundation of this group very timely, but there remain core questions that need to be addressed.

Aims & Objectives

This standing group aims to fill the gap between the exponential rise of corruption as a social problem with its various aliases (kleptocracy, state capture, political capitalism, etc), anti-corruption and integrity  as policy challenges and and the feeble presence of corruption as an academic sub-discipline in political science. More precisely, we aim to:

1.    Bridge the gap between the macro theories of democratic quality and development and individual and organization level studies on bribery and undue influence to enable a coherent stand alone theory of corruption in the grand tradition of historical sociology and political science.
2.    Allow scholars of every rank who work on corruption within classic political science or sociology departments to join a cross-disciplinary community to share work and advance knowledge of corruption as a major social science, not just a criminology topic.
3.    Fill the gap between academic studies of corruption and actionable, policy oriented research.
4.    Promote the study of corruption as a political science topic by sharing syllabi and facilitating communication between graduate students across universities.
5.    Create a knowledge infrastructure to support media and policymakers and bridge the gap between the prominence of the topic in the media and its study in universities.
 

Activities

•    Organization of special sections on corruption and dedicated workshops within ECPR major events to enable communication across approaches and methods 
•    Reach out the wider academic community of scholars via a dedicated facebook group page and twitter account. 
•    Facilitate the development of joint research projects through academic events and collaborative funded projects 
•    Enhance collaboration with other Standing Groups (in particular with the SG on Organised Crime) in order to explore common themes and develop new research projects
•    Online Roundtable Series on Organised Crime and Corruption, jointly organised by the ECPR Standing Groups on Organised Crime and (Anti-)Corruption and Integrity, 19 May, 23 June & 7 July 2021
•    Facebook Group ECPR Standing Group “(Anti-)Corruption and Integrity” with more than 1000 members 
•    Close collaboration with International Corruption Research Network (ICRN) and joint conferences (e.g. Bologna 2022, Barcelona 2023)