Abstract for: A System Dynamics Approach to Political Corruption

Corruption is a chronic problem that does not discriminate, it happens in most parts of society in one form or another, and the executive, legislative, and judicial branch is by no means an exception to this. Even with persistent societal and institutional pressure for policy intervention, political corruption is proven to be hard to mitigate regardless of its initial level. Our main research objective is to identify the fundamental structure of the broader corruption system, and to pinpoint the factors contributing to sustained political corruption. The work we have done has mainly been focused on building a conceptual model of corruption, mapping the processes that cause and maintain it, and how it interacts with society. The goal of our future work will be to further improve the quality of the model, especially regarding how well it represents real-life processes, as well as its applicability to different country calibrations. We wish to continue investigating possible policy options to tackle political corruption, and we are interested in understanding whether it is important to fit the model structure tightly to a given country, or whether it is possible to build a generic model that can be parameterised.