Elevating Anti-corruption: Understanding the emergence of moral justification as a source of integrity violations and fixing it

Corruption is considered one of the main factors impeding sustainable development and democracy worldwide, marking anti-corruption efforts as a fundamental responsibility for both state and market agents. While many anti-corruption strategies have been proposed, there is surprisingly little empirical research on what actually makes anti-corruption strategies effective. Moral justification is the central psychological as well as cultural mechanism that determines individuals’ moral agency by allowing them to disengage their personal causal agency from detrimental moral conduct and outcomes, and it determines agents’ likelihood of actively supporting organizational anti-corruption efforts – such as whistleblowing – despite individual risks. Simply put, we do not know what anti-corruption strategies work because we lack an understanding of how moral justification emerges in different organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts. The ANTICO project addresses these research gaps by:

1. investigating the different types of moral justification and their emergence in context
2. exploring how micro and macro-level logics of appropriateness can be translated into more effective anti-corruption strategies and compliance programs.