• Project coordinator and PI: Kristina S. Weißmüller (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

• Short title: Effective Anti-Corruption Strategies for Public Organizations

• Short summary: Administrative corruption is an unresolved issue that causes severe societal harm worldwide. Anti-corruption regulation neglects the human factor in the challenge of translating these policies into effective strategies within organizational contexts. This project develops a novel multi-dimensional framework and empirical evidence to explain why some public organizations are more corruptible than others, which anti-corruption strategies work under which conditions, and why. By conducting multi-country mixed-methods research, it provides new insights into how public organizations can govern corruption risks comprehensively. Consequently, anti-corruption strategies can be designed more effectively by integrating insights from public integrity, compliance management, and behavioral public administration research.

• Keywords: Anti-corruption strategies; public integrity; behavioral public administration; organizational corruption risk control; compliance

About the NWO Talent Programme (Veni scheme round 2023): https://www.nwo.nl/en/news/from-algorithmic-criminal-justice-to-depressive-gut-bacteria-174-researchers-receive-veni-grant 

News & media:

• https://vu.nl/en/news/2024/veni-grant-for-public-administration-scientist-kristina-s-weissmuller 

• https://vu.nl/en/news/2024/record-number-of-veni-grants-for-promising-vu-researchers 

• Project coordinator and PI: Kristina S. Weißmüller (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

• Project members: Tijs van den Broek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands) & Steven J. Watson (Universieit Twente, the Netherlands) .

• More information: https://research.vu.nl/en/projects/justifying-the-unjust-a-multidisciplinary-study-exploring-and-ass 

• Research objectives: Criminal groups communicate strategically about their practices to legitimate them in the court of public opinion as well as to morally justify their actions. For example, claims about the harmed party’s immorality, lack of intended harm, or positioning oneself as a Robin Hood type “virtuous criminal” may be used to derive communication strategies that legitimize criminal action through the psychological mechanism of moral balancing. Although legitimation strategies are common practices, we do not know how the general public evaluates criminal groups’ legitimation strategies. The goal of this project is to study the influence of legitimation strategies by criminal groups on public opinion. By conducting a systematic literature review and behavioral conjoint experiments informed by crime-fighting and prevention stakeholder expertise, this research project will reveal what types of legitimation strategies exist, what makes them effective, and how they may dangerously sway public opinion. Synergistically combining previously dispersed expertise from VU and UT researchers, this project lays important groundwork for subsequent research projects, and directly informs practice: a better understanding of the effectiveness of legitimation strategies will help support law enforcement agencies to develop effective delegitimization strategies to counter criminal action. 

• Keywords: Legitimization Strategies; Criminal practices; Public Opinion; Behavioral Public Administration; Anti-Corruption; Trust in Institutions 

• Research output:

  1. Watson, van den Broek & Weißmüller (2024). Scoping review of the legitimation strategies of groups engaging in unlawful and immoral activities. Preregistration: https://osf.io/je54s/

• Project coordinator and PI: Kristina S. Weißmüller (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

• Project members: Yarin Eski (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands) & Hortense Jongen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands).

• More information: https://research.vu.nl/en/projects/elevating-anti-corruption-understanding-the-emergence-of-moral-ju-2 

• Research objectives: Corruption is considered one of the main factors impeding sustainable development and democracy worldwide, marking anti-corruption efforts as a fundamental responsibility for both state and market agents. While many anti-corruption strategies have been proposed, there is surprisingly little empirical research on what actually makes anti-corruption strategies effective. Moral justification is the central psychological as well as cultural mechanism that determines individuals’ moral agency by allowing them to disengage their personal causal agency from detrimental moral conduct and outcomes, and it determines agents’ likelihood of actively supporting organizational anti-corruption efforts – such as whistleblowing – despite individual risks. Simply put, we do not know what anti-corruption strategies work because we lack an understanding of how moral justification emerges in different organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts. The ANTICO project addresses these research gaps by: 

  1. investigating the different types of moral justification and their emergence in context

  2. exploring how micro and macro-level logics of appropriateness can be translated into more effective anti-corruption strategies and compliance programs.

• Keywords: Corruption; Anti-corruption; Moral Justification; Public Integrity; Behavioral Public Administration; Criminology; Strategic Development Goals 

• Project coordinators: Jean-Patrick Villeneuve (Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland); Alberto Bitonti (Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland)

• Principal investigators: Kristina S. Weißmüller (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands); Xiankun LU (University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) of China); Gianluca Miscione (University College Dublin, Ireland; Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland); Pablo Contreras Vásquez (Universidad Autónoma de Chile); Shaila Seshia Galvin (IHEID The Graduate Institute of Geneva, Switzerland).

• More information: https://snis.ch/projects/deliberative-quality-in-trade-related-international-organizations/ 

• Research objectives: This project develops the concept of Deliberative Quality, focusing on its application in trade-related International Organizations (IOs), analyzing decision-making processes and stakeholder engagement strategies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nation Conference on Trade And Development (UNCTAD), and the International Trade Centre (ITC). Each of these organizations plays a different role in the international trade system, and has a different approach to decision-making/negotiations and stakeholder engagement. Using the lenses of Public Administration/Political Science, Behavioural Sciences, and Science and Technology Studies on one side, and the contribution of Anthropology, Law, and International Trade/Business on the other, this project develops a transdisciplinary framework of analysis, aiming to: 

  1. assess the Deliberative Quality produced in the three trade-related IOs, and 

  2. provide insights and recommendations to structurally achieve higher Deliberative Quality in decision-making processes, making them more inclusive, accountable, legitimate, and thus more impactful. 

• More information: https://snis.ch/projects/deliberative-quality-in-trade-related-international-organizations/

• Keywords: Deliberative Quality; Global Governance; Inteernational Bureaucracies; International Organization; Negotiation Behavior; Strategic Development Goals 

• Principal investigator: Kristina S. Weißmüller; Co-PI: Lode De Waele & Arjen van Witteloostuijn

• Other collaborators: Catherine Althaus, Robert K. Christensen, Ting GONG, Dennis Hilgers, Fabian Homberg, Mei-Jen HUNG, Sang-Mook KIM , Kristoffer Kolltveit, Ming-Feng KUO, Jenny Lewis, Fabio Monteduro, Janine O’Flynn, Guillem Ripoll Pascual, Adrian Ritz, Lisa Schmidthuber, Dong Chul SHIM , Tsai-tsu SU, Jeannette Taylor, Richard Walker, Hanyu XIAO, & Sunny Litianqing YANG

• Research objectives: Public sector corruption is a critical yet severely understudied phenomenon worldwide. The CorPuS project is a non-commercial, non-commissioned pro-bono scientific research project driven by an international network of academic researchers who are passionate about understanding public sector corruption and about finding effective solutions for practice. The CorPuS project was initiated by Kristina S. Weißmüller, Lode De Waele, and Arjen van Witteloostuijn who also coordinate the project as principle investigators. Collectively, the CorPuS research consortium consists of 21 researchers based in 20 universities and academic research institutes in 15 countries worldwide in the first wave of the project. In 2020, we started raising data in five additional countries (second wave). 

• More information: www.corpus-project.org 

• Keywords: Corruption; Anti-corruption; Rule Breaking; PSM; Public Integrity; Behavioral Public Administration

• Related publications:

  1.  De Waele, L. & Weißmüller, K.S. (2019). Over de bureaucratische paradox en de effecten van Public Service Motivation op corruptie (On the bureaucratic paradox and the effects of Public Service Motivation on corruption). Vlaams Tijdschrift voor Overheidsmanagement (Flemish Journal of Public Management) 24 (2): 43-56. http://vtom.be/table_of_content.aspx?sy=2019&pn=2 [Preprint] 

  2. De Waele, L., Weißmüller, K.S., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (2021).  Bribery and the role of public service motivation and social value orientation. A multi-site experimental study in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Frontiers in Psychology - Organizational Psychology, 12:655964. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655964 [open access]

  3. Weißmüller, K.S., De Waele, L., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (2022). Public Service Motivation and Prosocial Rule-Breaking – An international vignettes study in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 42(2): 258-286. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X20973441. [Preprint] 

  4. Weißmüller, K.S., & De Waele, L. (2022).  Would you Bribe your Lecturer? A Quasi-experimental Study on Burnout and Bribery in Higher Education. Research in Higher Education, 63, 768-796. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-021-09669-1 [open access] 

  5. Weißmüller, K.S., & Zuber, A. (2023). Understanding the Micro-foundations of Administrative Corruption in the Public Sector: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review. Public Administration Review, 83(6), 1704-1726. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13699 [open access]

• Principal researchers & project managers: Kristina S. Weißmüller & Rick Vogel

• Collaborators: Robin Bouwman

• PhD-Project at the Chair of Public Management funded by University of Hamburg, Germany 

• Research objectives: PPPs are extremely powerful organizational arrangements that allow the sharing of risk and benefits of large scale projects in a synergetic manner. However, many PPPs fail because partners find it hard to maintain efficient long-term relationships across sectoral boundaries. In this project, we explore behavioral biases in decision-making within the context of public-private partnerships. We introduce novel psychological and behavioral research methods such as z-Tree experiments and game theoretical approaches into PA and PM research to investigate the role of ‘publicness’, ‘otherness’, PSM, and (anti-)public sector attitudes on strategic choice in PPPs with a special focus on risk behavior, the emergence and erosion of trust, collaboration efficiency, and institutional rule compliance.

• Keywords: Risk Behavior; Public-private Partnerships; Strategic Management; Anti-public Sector Bias; Deviant Behavior; Behavioral Public Administration

• Related publications:

  1. Weißmüller, K.S. (2022). Publicness and Micro-Level Risk Behaviour: Experimental Evidence on Stereotypical Discounting Behaviour. Public Management Review, 24(4): 601-630. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2020.1862287 [Preprint]

  2. Weißmüller, K.S., & Vogel, R. (2021). Sector-specific associations, trust, and survival of PPPs: A behavioral experiment based on the centipede game. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 31(3): 578–595. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaa050 [Preprint] 

  3. Weißmüller, K.S., De Waele, L., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (2022). Public Service Motivation and Prosocial Rule-Breaking – An international vignettes study in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 42(2): 258-286. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X20973441. [Preprint] 

  4. Weißmüller, K.S., Bouwman, R., & Vogel, R. (2021). Satisficing or Maximizing in Public-Private Partnerships? A Laboratory Experiment on Strategic Bargaining . Public Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.2013072 [Preprint]

  5. Weißmüller, K.S. (2020). Risk in Public Private Partnerships: Behavioral Experiments on Risk Preference, Risk Perception, and Risk Participation. Doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Business, Economics, and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany. 1st advisor: Prof Dr. Rick Vogel, 2nd advisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Lange. https://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/handle/ediss/8556 [open access]