Corruption and Comparative Analyses across Europe: Developing New Research Traditions

The significance of ‘corruption’ in Europe has arisen both through the work of established scientific studies and scholarship seeking to understand its nature, scope, extent and control, and as a priority of state and non-state organisations seeking to reshape anti-corruption policy and practice within individual nation-states and the European Union more generally. Corruption is variously defined in social science and policy, but the European Commission (EC), in line with the international anti-corruption agenda, defines the concept as ‘the abuse of power for private gain’. The EC suggests corruption takes many forms including bribery, trading in influence, abuse of functions alongside nepotism, conflicts of interest, or revolving doors between the public and the private sectors. However, the EC is not in a position to impose a common legal definition on what (other than fraud against the EU) remains a national issue for each Member and non-Member State. Given the cultural and legal diversity across the European region, this essay poses the question: how and what do we know about ‘corruption’, domestically and transnationally, across Europe? This question inevitably encourages thinking about theory, methodology and evidence in social scientific inquiry and more specifically the nature of the comparative method to gain insight into corruption at universal, idiographic and integrated levels. To inform this debate, we outline in brief what we see as the four main research traditions in criminological research in Europe (surveys, experiments, and modelling studies; qualitative studies; national case studies; and analysis of specific cases of corruption) that have sought to empirically investigate, and contribute to knowledge on corruption. Following an evaluation of what can be learnt, methodologically and substantively, we see a predominance of national and sub-national level analyses which raises implications for what a European perspective on corruption looks like. For this reason, we then go on to argue for the need to cultivate theoretically-driven comparative methods of research that can stimulate interactive dialogue, deliberation and argument across European countries, regions and localities with a view to establishing robust empirical and theoretical insights. This essay explores ways of doing this, foregrounding the use of deliberative methods to better understand what is European about corruption in Europe, with focus on new concepts and tools of producing knowledge and theory cross-culturally.