ANTICORRP is a new large-scale research project funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program. The project started in March 2012 and will last for five years. The Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS is one of the partners in a consortium of 21 research groups from 16 countries.

The central objective of ANTICORRP is to investigate factors that promote or hinder the development of effective anticorruption policies. ANTICORRP will investigate the causes of corruption, how corruption can be conceptualized and measured as well as the impact of corruption on various aspects of human wellbeing. A central issue will be how policy responses can be tailored as to deal effectively with various forms of corruption.

The knowledge about the negative impact that corruption has on various aspects of human well-being (such as economic prosperity, health, life satisfaction, gender equality, social trust, poverty and political legitimacy) has been well established. At the same time, knowledge about how corruption can be successfully fought by political means is much less developed. The project will identify general global trends concerning corruption and select ‘overperforming’ and ‘underperforming’ countries (in Europe and in other regions) in terms of their progress towards less corrupt governance regimes and conduct more detailed qualitative analyses of these cases. In addition, a large-scale survey of various apects of “the quality of government” in all EU member states will be conducted.

This interdisciplinary project includes researchers from anthropology, criminology, economics, gender studies, history, law, political science, public policy and public administration. The project will strive to ensure that the research results are discussed with policy makers and the general public by using high profile multimedia tools as well as a number of research-to-policy workshops.

Project coordinator is The Quality of Government Institute (University of Gothenburg.