Corruption Reloaded: Conceptual Tools for Better Measurement

This Section explores how conceptual work on corruption can improve how corruption is measured, diagnosed, and addressed through anticorruption efforts. Common definitions, such as “misuse of entrusted power for private gain,” and existing indicators, such as perception-based indices, only partially capture how corruption operates within and around public institutions. They struggle to integrate legal but ethically contentious practices, such as certain forms of familism, structural and systemic forms of abuse, such as institutional, regulatory, or media capture, and opaque public–private arrangements, such as lobbying and revolving doors. Recent work in political theory and conceptual engineering has proposed alternative understandings of corruption, e.g., as a deficit of officeholders’ accountability in using their power of office. Research in political science, public administration, and sociology has developed a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods for studying corruption: cross-national indices, survey-based measures, experiments, case studies, process-tracing, and ethnographic work on everyday practices in public organizations. Existing indicators and datasets capture diverse manifestations of corruption but often in isolation. Missing are conceptually integrated approaches combining these dimensions coherently and empirical studies showing how such elements can be jointly operationalized. Recent research has emphasized that corruption is a multi-level phenomenon, operating simultaneously at macro (systemic, political, and regulatory), meso (organizational, institutional, and sectoral), and micro (individual, behavioural, and interactional) levels. Existing measures provide valuable but scattered insights that only partially reflect the multi-level and complex nature of corruption. The Section brings these strands together. It examines how refined concepts can inform the construction and use of indicators across levels of analysis, and how empirical work can feed back into conceptual revisions. It also aims to translate conceptual and methodological advances into insights informing the design and evaluation of anti-corruption policies across contexts. It asks: - What are the advantages and limits of competing concepts of corruption (e.g. public power/private gain, legal/illegal, accountability deficit) for research and policy? - How do conceptual choices affect the design, validity, and interpretation of corruption measures and diagnostics? - How can different types of evidence (perceptions, experiences, institutional data, qualitative case studies) be combined in conceptually coherent ways? - How can conceptually grounded diagnostics translate into targeted anticorruption tools and accountability mechanisms within and across public institutions? The Section welcomes contributions from normative political theory, political philosophy, conceptual analysis and engineering, comparative politics, international relations, public administration, law, sociology, economics, and methodology. It invites both theoretical and empirical work using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches. The overarching objective is to connect conceptual innovations with empirical measurement and policy practice, to advance a multi-level understanding of corruption and accountability in European and global contexts. Planned Panels (provisional list) Panel 1 – Conceptual Foundations: Competing Concepts and Normative Foundations This Panel invites contributions that clarify and critically assess different concepts of corruption and their normative underpinnings. It encompasses work from conceptual analysis, normative political theory, and conceptual engineering examining how corruption relates to office, accountability, institutional integrity, and the rule of law. It is open to contributions comparing competing concepts, proposing improved ones, or analysing the policy implications of conceptual choices. Panel 2 – From Concepts to Indicators: Validity and Coherence in Corruption Measurement This Panel focuses on the connection between definitions of corruption and measurement strategies. It welcomes papers assessing existing indices and indicators in terms of conceptual clarity and operational coherence. Contributions may propose quality evaluation frameworks, new ways of combining data sources, or strategies to address validity, comparability, and sustainability, linking these proposals to conceptual discussions. Panel 3 – Beyond Unidimensional Corruption Metrics: mixed-source and multi-level approaches to measuring corruption This Panel invites conceptual and empirical work moving beyond one-dimensional indicators to develop mixed-source and multi-level strategies for measuring corruption. It welcomes research integrating different data sources to capture the complex and relational dynamics of corruption. Papers may propose or test measurement frameworks combining systemic/macro, organisational/meso, and individual/micro levels of analysis, or linking multiple datasets to explore corruption as a multi-causal and context-dependent phenomenon. Panel 4 – Corruption as Institutional Dysfunction: Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Approaches This Panel emphasizes qualitative or mixed-methods approaches to studying corruption as institutional dysfunction or accountability failure. It invites case studies, process-tracing analyses, ethnographic and interview-based work, and mixed designs integrating qualitative evidence with quantitative indicators. A focus will be on how such studies operationalize concepts like “accountability deficit,” “office misuse,” or “systemic corruption,” and what they reveal about the limits of existing measures. Panel 5 – Gender, Inequality, and Corruption: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges This Panel examines how gender and other dimensions of inequality (class, ethnicity, or migration status) interact with corruption and anticorruption. It welcomes work on gendered patterns of exposure to corruption, phenomena such as “sextortion,” and the implications of different concepts of corruption for capturing these dynamics. Panel 6 – The Digital Turn: Algorithmic Tools, Big Data and Integrity Risks This Panel considers how big data and algorithmic tools are reshaping the measurement of corruption and the design of anticorruption interventions. Possible contributions include: studies using digital traces or big data to detect corruption risks; analyses of how online information and disinformation affect perceptions and indicators of corruption; and critical assessments of algorithmic monitoring tools from the perspective of office accountability and institutional ethics. Panel 7 – From Diagnosis to Practice: Accountability-Centred Anticorruption Tools in Institutions This Panel links conceptual and empirical work to the design of anticorruption tools within public institutions. It welcomes papers on office-ethics training, internal accountability mechanisms, whistleblowing, and other organizational practices to prevent or remedy corruption. Contributions may present evaluations of interventions, comparative studies of institutional arrangements, or normative analyses translating conceptual frameworks into practical guidance for public officeholders. Panel 8 - Evaluating Anticorruption Policies: Evidence, Impact, and Context This panel focuses on how conceptual and measurement innovations could inform evidence-based anti-corruption policymaking at EU or global levels. Contributions may include impact assessments of specific anti-corruption interventions, comparative analyses of national or sectoral policy frameworks, or critical examination of the methodological challenges of evaluating corruption, such as attribution, data limitations, or the role of contextual factors.