Elevating Public Integrity by Preventing Corruption (EPIC) – Revealing the latent typologies and success factors of effective anti-corruption strategies

Administrative corruption is an unresolved issue that erodes public integrity worldwide, causing severe societal harm. Designing effective anti-corruption strategies for public organizations is of paramount importance but regulatory approaches often fail because they neglect the role of human agency in the process of translating anti-corruption policies into organizational strategies, despite prolific evidence on the impact of human psychology and behavior on organizational outcomes.

With this Veni project, I will solve this puzzle by exploring the impact of the missing factor of human agency and sense-making on the design of public organizations’ anti-corruption strategies in context. I will break new scientific ground by bridging the disjunct discourses on compliance vs. integrity approaches to anti-corruption to reveal the latent typologies and success factors of effective anti-corruption strategy design for public organizations. This novel multi-dimensional behavioral theory of public sector anti-corruption effectiveness will close the policy-strategy implementation gap and elevate anti-corruption research and practice.

Methodologically, I will ascertain how integrity-related policies are translated into organizational anti-corruption strategies by conducting qualitative interviews with expert anti-corruption personnel in public organizations. I reveal the latent typologies of anti-corruption strategies by conducting a systematic literature review. Synthetically, I disentangle the multi-level causal mechanisms that determine their effectiveness in the fight against distinct corruption types with a rigorous conjoint survey experiment. Assessing the generalizability of the findings across different fields of civil service provision and administrative cultures with this multi-method, multi-county research (NL & CH) significantly advances anti-corruption theory and practice.

I will engage with stakeholders to maximize my Veni project’s impact to help strengthen public institutions by disseminating its novel insights on how anti-corruption strategies can be designed more effectively by leveraging insights from public integrity, compliance management, and behavioral public administration research into practice to help fight corruption in public organizations worldwide.

Administrative corruption is an unresolved issue that causes severe societal harm worldwide. Anti-corruption regulation neglects the human factor in the challenge of translating these policies into effective strategies within organizational contexts. This project develops a novel multi-dimensional framework and empirical evidence to explain why some public organizations are more corruptible than others, which anti-corruption strategies work under which conditions, and why. By conducting multi-country mixed-methods research, it provides new insights into how public organizations can govern corruption risks comprehensively. Consequently, anti-corruption strategies can be designed more effectively by integrating insights from public integrity, compliance management, and behavioral public administration research.