The European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) was established in 2012 at the Hertie School in Berlin under the direction of Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi as a 21st century research network based in multiple locations and relying on crowdsourcing to produce governance indicators for 140 countries, whose main presence is on its Internet pages, corruptionrisk.org and europam.eu. ERCAS was a joint project of Hertie School with the Romanian Academic Society.
ERCAS supported the scaling up of anticorruption projects inspired by the work of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, like Coalitions for Clean Parliament or Clean Universities by different country coalitions and donors in over ten countries. It supported the Ukranian coalition Chesno! and designed the curriculum of the anticorruption teaching and research centre ACREC at the University of Kyiv Mohyla in Ukraine.
Since November 2024 ERCAS transferred its main activity, the Governance Indicators Lab at the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, as part of LEAP.
ERCAS is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy via the International Centre for Private Enterprise and by the European Union Horizon projects.
The main ERCAS project is BRIDGEGAP, designed and led by Professor Mungiu-Pippidi. BRIDGEGAP is a €6-million multidisciplinary research project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe scheme (Project Number: 101132483), bringing together a consortium of 15 partners. Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (LUISS Guido Carli) serves as the project’s Principal Investigator of the project.
BRIDGEGAP approaches corruption as a policy problem, focusing on understanding both domestic vulnerabilities and cross-border factors that undermine the control of corruption. From January 2024 to December 2027, BRIDGEGAP will aim to:
- Fill the knowledge gaps regarding the extent to which corruption infiltrates open societies and threatens democratic order, as well as the mechanisms involved.
- Assess, explain and find solutions to digital transparency gaps, ranging from the use of technology in corruption and anticorruption, to public accountability and integrity.
- Identify solutions to regulatory and enforcement gaps by evaluating the comprehensiveness, consistency, and adequacy of public accountability and anticorruption regulations across EU member states and neighboring countries.
- Fill the academia–policy gap in corruption studies by evaluating the impact of anticorruption regulations and policies and identifying enabling contexts for effective anticorruption action.
The research will lead to academic publications and the creation of interactive analytical and research platforms, such as comparative law repositories, the EU Compass, the European Transparency Index, and “Follow the Money” search engines that span newly interconnected databases. All its pooled data will be displayed transparently on the website as a DataHub and will offer end users the same investigation and analytical tools as the project researchers, inviting crowdsourcing and offering online tutorials. A Massive Open Online Corruption Course (MOOC) will also be developed.
More information on BRIDGEGAP can be found at corruptiondata.eu, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
