Crime and culture

The research project aimed to develop means to optimize corruption prevention in the EU. urgency of such a project was reflected in the fact that corruption holds the potential to retard seriously the process of the Community’s enlargement and integration, even to the extent of threatening the very core of its concept of social order. The prevention policies that have been developed by the EU and implemented so far within individual member countries have in general been characterized by legislative, administrative and police force measures. These are based on a definition of corruption prevention developed in political and administrative institutions that, for its implementation, rely on a “top-down“ procedure. The research project purported to conduct not an inquiry into the nature of corruption “as such“, but rather into the perceptions of corruption held by political and administrative decision-makers in specific regions and cultures, those held by actors representing various institutions and authorities, and above all by the citizens and the media in European societies.