Challenges Behind the Data: Empirical Research on Corruption from Researchers’ Perspectives

This paper examines how corruption researchers themselves experience and navigate the methodological, ethical, and practical challenges of studying corruption. While demand for evidence-based (anti-)corruption research has grown rapidly, systematic reflection on how such research is conducted, and on the risks it entails, remains limited. Although the inherently interdisciplinary field of corruption studies has long debated why anti-corruption initiatives so often fail, it has paid comparatively little attention to the key barriers and lived realities faced by researchers, despite their direct impact on the development of the field. The paper addresses two core questions: What challenges do corruption researchers themselves identify across the research process, from data collection to analysis? And what lessons do they draw from their own practices when confronting these obstacles? Empirically, the paper draws on an original online survey of 348 experts working on corruption across academia, policy institutions, and investigative journalism. Respondents provided open-ended reflections on their experiences with both primary and secondary data, generating a rich dataset that captures how researchers encounter access barriers, data reliability problems, political interference, personal risk, and ethical trade-offs in practice. In the presentation, we will first provide a systematic overview of the most frequently reported challenges in corruption and anti-corruption research as identified by researchers themselves. Second, we will present results of the analysis of these challenges using large-scale open-ended responses, approximating a large-N interview dataset. Third, we will synthesise the lessons researchers draw from their experiences into key themes that can help future scholars anticipate and navigate common obstacles. By foregrounding researchers’ perspectives, this research aims to stimulate discussion on the hidden difficulties of corruption research and on ways to better support those conducting it.