CEU Team Part of New EU-Funded Research Project Addressing Political Corruption

In May, a team of CEU researchers, led by Department of Public Policy Associate Professor Mihaly Fazekas, will begin work as part of a new project: RESPOND (Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies). The research aims to address challenges to democracy through an interdisciplinary assessment of political corruption. The five-year project includes a consortium of 16 partners led by the University of Bologna and is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program in the amount of six million euro. CEU’s RESPOND research team includes Agnes Batory, Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Pro-Rector for Research and Faculty, and Arieda Muco, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Business. The team will also involve CEU colleagues at the postdoctoral, PhD and master s levels. The researchers will be measuring and collecting data related to behaviors and actions that proliferate in legal grey areas, which lead to biased decision-making and exclusion in the political cycle. RESPOND will specifically examine corrupt phenomena in public spending, political finance, lobbying, personal connections and media across 27 European Union countries and 11 neighboring countries. The work includes exploring how digital technologies are intertwined with political corruption and also how such technologies can enhance anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies at national and transnational levels. RESPOND will also develop new risk indicators to improve citizen monitoring and integrity in contemporary democracies. “Corruption in the highest levels of political decisions, such as laws in parliament or public investment decisions, fundamentally impacts democratic institutions and how popular preferences translate into public policy,” said Fazekas. He added: “It is therefore critical to identify the signs of corrupt deals to develop effective anti-corruption strategies which protect democracy. This is what our project aims to do.” The RESPOND project assessments directly build on the research conducted at CEU in the Global Corruption Observatory, a project that ran from 2021-23. Led by Fazekas with leading anticorruption researchers, the Observatory developed a data-analytics approach to uncover hidden patterns in law-making and government contracting. The Global Corruption Observatory has been supported by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and hosted at the university’s Department of Public Policy. During its three-year tenure, it yielded several publications on topics including regulatory impact assessments, public procurement and corruption, as well as analysis tools to examine public procurement risks and a syllabus focused on anticorruption practices. “The Global Corruption Observatory brought together large-scale administrative datasets on legislative activities, government contracts and grants, and showed that they can be used to track political corruption,” said Fazekas, who in 2021 was awarded first place in the International Monetary Fund’s Anti-Corruption Challenge. “RESPOND will build on the Observatory’s policy engagements and training activities to bring this approach closer to European citizens in an even wider range of countries.” Other partners in the RESPOND consortium are the Anti-Corruption Research And Education C Government Transparency Ins University of Goth Institute for Global Ana King s College L Libera-Associazione, Nomi e Numeri contro le M Sciences Po; Sustainable Communication with its affiliates Net7 and Tele Radio C University of Ams University of L University of Duisburg-E and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Unit: Department of Public PolicyDepartment of Economics and BusinessDoctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International RelationsResearch Area: Business and Management StudiesEconomicsPublic PolicyCategory: NewsImage: Content Priority: High

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