RESPOND – Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies

The project

RESPOND – Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies – is a research project dedicated to shed light on the corruption and undue influence that undermine the quality of democracy.

Coordinated by the University of Bologna, it is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme (“Research and Innovation Action” grant) for a period of 5 years (May 2024 to April 2029).

Project objectives

How exactly does political corruption work in today's digital societies? How pervasive is its negative impact on democracy? And how can anti-corruption efforts rebuild people's support for democracy? RESPOND will address these key questions by bringing together researchers who specialise in the detection, measurement and evaluation of corruption, as well as specialists in social movements and political participation who are interested in the effects of corruption on citizens' trust in the political system. 

Based on a mixed-methods research design, RESPOND examines 27 EU countries and 11 neighbouring countries in order to understand the mechanisms of corruption in digital societies, its impact on democracy, and the responses needed to promote people’s commitment to integrity. It does so by:

1. analysing four contemporary and relevant forms of political influence: political finance, lobbying, revolving doors/personal ties, and media capture; 
2. evaluating how political corruption is understood by political elites and citizens and is socially constructed through media and education; 
3. exploring how digital technologies entangle with political corruption and how they improve anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies; 
4. engaging with relevant stakeholders to co-create practices and tools (including new risk indicators), to increase civic monitoring and integrity in democracies. 

The Sciences Po team will work closely with the CEU team and they will be responsible for the most extensive empirical data-collection work package in the project. They will assemble large-scale micro-level datasets on legislative and regulatory processes across various countries, and design a series of corruption risk indicators in order to measure corruption and favouritism in policymaking in Europe, and its effects at the level of companies or economic sectors. 

Team at the CEE

• Cyril Benoît, CNRS Researcher, PI of the team
• Sebastian Thieme, Postdoctoral Researcher

Partners

The project, coordinated by the University of Bologna (Italy), involves 16 European partners, including universities, NGOs and private institutions : Central European University (Austria), Sustainable Communication (Belgium) and its affiliates Net7 (Italy) and Tele Radio City (Italy), Institute for Global Analytics (Bulgaria), Sciences Po (France), University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Government Transparency Institute (Hungary), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), Libera-associazione, nomi e numeri contro le mafie (Italy), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Lisbon (Portugal), University of Gothenburg (Sweden), King’s College London (UK), and Anti-Corruption Research And Education Centre (Ukraine).

Find out more

RESPOND directly builds on the research conducted in the Global Corruption Observatory.