RESPOND · RESPOND- Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies

Corruption and undue influences are not only linked to democratic discontent but compromise the quality of democracy. But how exactly does political corruption operate today? How deep can its negative impact on democracy go? And how can anti-corruption efforts recover people’s support for democracy as a regime and promote their engagement with integrity and their refusal of undemocratic proposals and actions? To address these crucial challenges for democracy, RESPOND proposes a novel interdisciplinary assessment of political corruption, seen here as conducts and acts, often proliferating in grey zones regarding legality, that results in decision-making bias and exclusion in the policy cycle. It does so by: 1) analyzing four contemporary and relevant forms of political influence (political finance, lobbying, revolving doors/personal ties and media capture) to understand when they become troubling forms of influences connected to specific political corruption patterns; hence, undermining fair competition and broad participation in political decision-making processes; 2) evaluating how political corruption is understood by political elites and citizens and is socially constructed through media and education, as well as its impacts on both democracy’s legitimacy and credibility and on responses to counter them; 3) exploring how established and emerging digital technologies entangle with political corruption and how they improve anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies at both national and cross-border levels; 4) engaging in co-creation with relevant stakeholders to design, test, and revise practices and tools, including new risk indicators developed by RESPOND, to increase civic monitoring and integrity in current democracies. Through a mixed-method research design, RESPOND investigates 27 EU countries and 11 neighbouring countries to signal ways to make governments, public officials, and political parties perform better ethically and recover democracy’s popularity.