Increasing both transparency and efficiency of public spending in the age of austerity presents formidable challenges for European societies. Innovative, open data tools hold the key to simultaneously meet both. The key objective of the proposed project is to combine the provision of data on public spending in the area of public procurement with actionable governance indicators and a monitoring procedure facilitating whistleblowing and thus strengthening accountability and transparency of public administrations. Since public procurement is prone to corruption and budget deficit risks, high quality open data and innovative assessment tools in this area are especially relevant for the efficient and transparent use of public resources. The project, in particular, aims to systematically collect, analyse, and broadly disseminate tender-level information on public procurement in 35 jurisdictions across Europe. This data will be linked to company and public organisation information on finances and ownership and to information on mechanisms that increase accountability of public officials in order to systematically investigate the patterns and mechanisms of allocation of public resources in Europe. The proposed project addresses directly the objectives of the call by using innovative ICT-based measures and services which will provide wide access to information about governments’ spending and additionally involve private and public agents to actively collaborate in improving the quality and volume of the relevant data. Partners represent an effective combination of large, well-renowned institutions and small and highly-innovative ones, including scientists and researchers from computer and political sciences, sociology, criminology, and economics at 6 institutions from 5 European countries, both old and new members states. The project builds extensively on the partners’ prior innovative work in this area as well as their rich experience with EU funded projects.

Corruption and undue influences are not only linked to democratic discontent but compromise the quality of democracy. But how exactly does political corruption operate today? How deep can its negative impact on democracy go? And how can anti-corruption efforts recover people’s support for democracy as a regime and promote their engagement with integrity and their refusal of undemocratic proposals and actions? To address these crucial challenges for democracy, RESPOND proposes a novel interdisciplinary assessment of political corruption, seen here as conducts and acts, often proliferating in grey zones regarding legality, that results in decision-making bias and exclusion in the policy cycle. It does so by: 1) analyzing four contemporary and relevant forms of political influence (political finance, lobbying, revolving doors/personal ties and media capture) to understand when they become troubling forms of influences connected to specific political corruption patterns; hence, undermining fair competition and broad participation in political decision-making processes; 2) evaluating how political corruption is understood by political elites and citizens and is socially constructed through media and education, as well as its impacts on both democracy’s legitimacy and credibility and on responses to counter them; 3) exploring how established and emerging digital technologies entangle with political corruption and how they improve anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies at both national and cross-border levels; 4) engaging in co-creation with relevant stakeholders to design, test, and revise practices and tools, including new risk indicators developed by RESPOND, to increase civic monitoring and integrity in current democracies. Through a mixed-method research design, RESPOND investigates 27 EU countries and 11 neighbouring countries to signal ways to make governments, public officials, and political parties perform better ethically and recover democracy’s popularity.

Current evidence suggests that the global fight against corruption faces serious challenges: policy decisions are not well informed, the corruption landscape is complex and enormous, while measuring corruption is so far mostly based on subjective approaches, and there is lack of appropriate technological tools to support anti-corruption. To address these challenges, FALCON is designed and dedicated to support the composition, update and management of comprehensive corruption intelligence pictures, within domains and jurisdictions of interest. This will be accomplished following a multi-actor, evidence-based, data-driven approach, building upon existing assets and prior work of consortium partners. FALCON will, first, develop and validate objective and actionable indicators (individual and composite) of corruption that can be used to inform policy decisions. Second, it will design, implement and integrate powerful data analytics tools, data pipelines and applications that support the management of the entire lifecycle of corruption intelligence pictures. This will enable comprehensive corruption risk assessment, informed policy making, and improved anticorruption law enforcement. FALCON will be piloted in four corruption domains – corruption schemes at border crossings, sanction circumvention by kleptocrats/oligarchs, public procurement fraud, conflicts of interest of politically exposed persons (PEPs) – involving law enforcement experts (police authorities and border guards) from six (6) European countries and other key actors (i.e., GovTech providers, academia, financial intermediaries, policy makers, NGOs, and civil society). FALCON’s implementation will be incremental and iterative, forming synergies between SSH and technological expertise, and will adhere to the principles of Trustworthy AI and responsible research and innovation. Lastly, FALCON has defined specific key exploitable results and performance indicators for measuring its progress and success.