RESEARCH PROJECT:

1

• RESEARCH PROJECT
• CRIME AND CULTURE
• Research Group Germany
• Project Research Phase II Interviews
• Aspects of Fighting Corruption

2

• Target Group Politics
• Granting/receiving advantages is ultimately
  rooted in the exchange relations that make up the
  fabric of societies based on market economy.
• Therefore there will always be spaces of
  exchange relations that cannot be covered by the
  regulating instruments of law and penal sanction.
• Nevertheless the fact that there are more or
  less clear societal perceptions and claims of
  what can reasonably be considered illegitimate
  helps
• sharpen the sensibilities about illegitimate
  conduct

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• Raising sensibilities a workable basis for
  prevention policies in the sense of rendering the
  illegitimate either illegal or very difficult to
  be carried on with.
• Politicians turning over to private business
  immediately after quitting or retiring from
  politics should be perceived as illegitimate. A
  possible preventive approach would be to prolong
  the transition time up to two years.
• The plan to set up an anti corruption register
  must again be put on the agenda of legislative
  action.
• Raising awareness that corruption means damage
  once it is certain that the image damage for the
  company/state institution involved is high, this
  can function as deterrent.

4

• Shuffling with jobs and posts in the party
  apparatus. This should be considered as
  illegitimate (sign of favouritism, power
  machinations, granting advantages and
  corruption).
• All those cases in which forms of linkage of
  politics and private interests are perceived to
  be illegitimate. This holds also true of the
  communal management of public affairs.
• When the ministerial bureaucracy makes use of
  external experts in formulating law drafts.
  The suspicion of illegitimate intrusion of
  private interests in state legislation is more
  than reasonable.
• Overspending during elections campaigns.
• Exposing all additional revenues the MPs draw
  from other occupations. The exposure does not
  target primarily the level of income, but rather
  where it comes from.
• Conspicuous donations to MPs.

5

• Target Group Judiciary
• Raising public awareness can of course not be
  sustained without establishing certain control
  regularities.
• Trying to raise public sensibilities either
  through
• a) increasing intolerance towards illegitimate
  (corrupt) conduct, or
• b) putting observation on a regular basis,
• are however forms of prevention that may not go
  deep enough.

6

• The motivational set-up of corrupt conduct
  contains much more than the quest of money or
  power.
• It involves certain values that are for example
  based on
• a) a narrow utilitaristic approach that reduces
  education to a purely success oriented, pragmatic
  attitude to knowledge
• b) the failure of the family to transmit
  exemplary behavioural patterns.
• Raising public awareness that the prevailing
  attitudes of economic or social success have a
  corrosive effect on the moral fabric of culture
  ethical rules of action being observed only if
  they comply with or do not decisively go against
  the logic of economic performance.

7

• Target Group Police
• Corruption transcends what is merely codified as
  legally sanctionable.
• Police investigations should have a structural
  approach a)Systematic detection of probable
  causes
• b)special skills to reconstruct the logic of
  the case
• c)Experience requirements
• Institutional actors should try translate their
  common sense experience of suspicious
  regularities in operationalisable material
  evidence of wrong-doing.
• Additionally supplementation of the
  institutional role acting by skills that bear
  upon a type of knowledge not directly flowing
  from the groundwork of the procedures of
  investigation/prosecution.

8

• Target Group Media/Journalism
• Journalistic work is essential to corruption
  prevention
• a)It traces corrupt conduct down to its social
  bearings, or conversely
• b) It follows the course of everyday co-operative
  action from the bottom up till it manifests
  criminal dimensions.
• Journalistic work depends on the information flow
  from the prosecution authorities.
• However, access to required information is not
  always easy, especially since expert lawyers
• a) deploy legal means to block off further
  investigations,
• b) deter the prosecution authorities from
  co-operating with the press supplying it with
  information.

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• General attorneys should therefore hold the
  communication channels to the press upright.
• In order to make journalistic work more
  effective, some prosecution deficits need to be
  removed
• a) The long time it takes to bring a case to
  court,
• b) Convictions not being hart enough,
• c) Overloaded prosecution personal, and
• d) Prescription times not being conform
  with
• the fact corruption cases demanding a
  great
• deal of time to be worked on.

10

• Target Group Civil Society (TI)
• The anti-corruption agenda is part of a reform
  process, which includes institutional
  transformation and a change of socio-cultural
  mentalities.
• Fighting corruption as part of an on-going
  process reforming socio-cultural attitudes, i.
  e. committing people to it and ensuring that
  things are grounded in peoples perceptions.
• Setting up the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres
  (ALACs) raises the chances of such a commitment.

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• Strengthening them implies the following
• Since the TI struggles for its own economic
  sustainability, further funding should be ensured
• the system of ALACs should be consolidated and
  expanded in other countries
• Regarding the cooperation between TI and ALACs
  the demand for the systematisation of the
  evaluation of incoming information should be met
• A centralised database for the collection of
  statistics should be promoted
• Centralised data processing leads to targeted
  knowledge and this in turn leads to concrete
  intervention steps regarding changes in the penal
  law.

12

• Target Group Economy
• The Business Conduct Guidelines and Code of
  Ethics is no guarantee that corruption will not
  take place so long as it does not function as
  frame of reference for everyday business as
  usual.
• No distinction should be made between the
  management culture and the business culture.
  The argument that they should be distinguished
  helps cover up structural corruption.
• This is the case even when the top-management
  assumes responsibility for wrong-doing this
  functions more often than not as exculpation of
  structural corrupt conduct.

13

• Structural corruption raising economic
  performance (i.e. winning new markets) through
  rule-violating action (briberies). Career
  advancement is often considered incompatible with
  the rules of fair play.
• Economic coercion will continue to be regarded
  as unavoidable reason for corrupt conduct as long
  as the employees (including top-management) put
  corporate interests (i.e. profit maximization)
  above certain rules of ethical conduct.
• The corporatist identification with overriding
  interests should be loosened the strong
  interdependencies between management and labour
  (under Germany's consensus-style codetermination
  management system) make employee works councils
  susceptible to corruption.