Survey research has played a pivotal role in corruption studies, providing essential evidence on citizens’ attitudes, perceptions, experiences and evaluations of corruption. Over the past five decades, survey-based research has expanded considerably, becoming one of the most consolidated empirical approaches in the field. Cross-national surveys and corruption indices have generated a substantial body of academic research, while also raising public awareness and contributing to anti-corruption policies and civic action worldwide.
The field has now reached a new stage. The challenge is not simply to collect more survey data, but to refine how corruption is conceptualised, measured and explained. Long-standing concerns regarding social desirability bias, measurement reliability, cross-cultural comparability, and the relationship between perceptions and actual experiences remain important. At the same time, methodological developments—particularly survey-embedded experiments—have considerably expanded the analytical potential of surveys for identifying causal mechanisms and examining how citizens evaluate corruption and integrity-related policies.
A key challenge for the next generation of research is therefore to connect the established strengths of survey research with institutional perspectives and objective measures of corruption. Surveys can provide insights into perceptions, attitudes, and reported experiences, while administrative and enforcement records, institutional indicators and other objective proxies capture different observable dimensions of the phenomenon. Bringing these sources of evidence together may help overcome the limitations of relying on any single measure and advance a more integrated understanding of corruption.
This panel welcomes contributions that advance survey-based research on corruption, particularly through: (a) methodological innovation, including survey-embedded experiments, such as list, conjoint and vignette experiments; (b) measurement validity, including strategies to account for data quality variations and to bridge perception-based measures with objective data and real-life experiences; (c) enhanced comparability across countries, subnational contexts and mass-elite settings; and (d) data integration, harmonizing different survey projects on corruption, as well as combining surveys with administrative and enforcement records, big data, qualitative evidence, institutional indicators and quality-of-democracy measures.
By bringing together cutting-edge research, the panel aims to take stock of the remarkable development of corruption survey research while exploring its next methodological and theoretical frontiers. In particular, it asks how survey evidence can be integrated with institutional and objective measures to strengthen both the scientific validity and the policy and civic relevance of corruption research.
