CORRUPTION NETWORKS

According to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (2003), corruption is a transnational phenomenon that affects societies in several ways: it causes unstable democracies (political front), unfair market competition (economic front), harm to natural environments (ecological front), and human rights violations (social front). As such, corruption is a complex, ubiquitous, and many-faceted threat to all countries that requires comprehensive and multidisciplinary approaches for its effective prevention and combat. However, traditional approaches lack the analytical tools to handle the non-trivial structural and dynamical aspects that characterize the modern social, economic, political and technological systems where corruption takes place, thus, best efforts to regulate this problem remain wanting. In this context, network science represents a comprehensive analytical approach for the study of this problem in such complex environments.

This satellite aims to gather leading experts on (anti)corruption studies working at the scientific frontier of this phenomenon, using network science, applied complexity, and other interdisciplinary approaches, in order to:

• present current theoretical, empirical, and operational efforts tackling this phenomenon;

• discuss the relevance of evidence-based and network approaches to anticorruption;

• find the best ways to convert the obtained knowledge into public policy;

• and connect interdisciplinary scientists working towards this goal.

ConfirmED SPEAKERS

AGENDA

Sep 19, 2020 (14:00 - 17:45 CET)

Welcoming: José R. Nicolás-Carlock

Talk 1: Mihaly Fazekas

Introduction

Talk 2: Johannes Wach

The Networked Origins of Economic Crime

Economic crimes like corruption and collusion typically involve many people. These people are embedded in broader social and economic networks that might help or hinder their bad behavior. In this talk I will discuss how analyzing these networks can highlight potential corruption hotspots in large data. Going past the question of detection, I frame economic crime as an emergent property of networks. Using two empirical studies I suggest how a network perspective can help us understand how corruption and collusion develop and persist.

Talk 3: Issa Luna-Pla & José R. Nicolás-Carlock

Corruption and complexity: a scientific framework for the analysis of corruption networks

Corruption is a systemic and adaptive phenomenon that requires comprehensive and multidisciplinary approaches for its effective prevention and combat. In this talk we present an empirical approach to model corruption using the concepts and tools of complexity science, mainly, complex networks science. Under this framework, we describe a major corruption scandal that took place in Mexico involving a network of hundreds of shell companies used to embezzle billions of dollars. We describe the structure and dynamics of this network using available information related to their personnel and the date of the companies’ creation. We measured some global parameters, such as density, diameter, average path length, and average degree in order to provide systematic evidence on which corporate characteristics are likely to signal corruption.

Talk 4: Willeke Slingerland

Network Corruption: When Social Capital Becomes Corrupted

Too often corruption is seen as an act of bribery between individuals. However, empirical research indicates that large scale corruption cases emerge in social networks. These networks form an important social capital but a certain point they deteriorate into corruption. As such, they do not only form corruption networks where corruption is systemic but the network itself becomes the actor which is corrupt even when individual acts are not necessarily corrupt. In my talk I will introduce the concept of network corruption by using corruption cases from across the world. I hope to discuss with you how a network perspective is an essential layer to include in the prevention and repression of corruption and what this means in terms of individual and collective responsibility.

Talk 5: Philip Solimine

Corrupting the Dynamics of Opinion Exchange in Social Networks

An unfortunate byproduct of the inherent nature of social interaction is that the actions of a small number of corrupt individuals can drastically affect the trajectory of the entire social dynamics. This talk will formulate political corruption using the tools of network control theory; the aim being to understand the mechanisms by which corrupting actors alter member behavior at certain points within a larger social system. In other words, we will investigate how social capital is harnessed to amplify the effects of corruption using a social influence network or hierarchy – with the ultimate goal of understanding how corruption and external control affect the incentives that drive the formation and evolution of social networks. We will begin by investigating the incentive structure of individual nodes, and behavioral heuristics that could be used to simplify their complicated decision problem. From there, we will use network controllability metrics to investigate the emergent effects of such behavior on the dynamic structure of the network itself, and conduct a cursory examination of these predictions by comparing panels of data on network controllability to traditional corruption indices.

Talk 6: Oscar Granados

Structural Analysis of Financial Crime in Large-Scale Financial Networks

Financial crimes are social problems that affect different communities around the world, involving public and private organizations in diverse sectors and activities. We analyze some global financial networks focusing on particular aspects of their characteristics when suspicious activities of tax fraud, corruption, and money laundering could be identified. This research provides a perspective on the presence of financial crime phenomena in global financial networks through the study of their large-scale structure with topology and geometry tools. Our results reveal that suspicious activities run in small groups, and they emerge around communities of financial intermediaries, non-financial intermediaries, and offshore entities. Moreover, we find preliminary indications that these activities can play a role in deviating the degree distributions of these networks from a power-law behavior.

Talk 7: Silvia Fierascu

Networks as Anti-Corruption Policy Tools

Anti-Corruption efforts are failing to coagulate into sustainable models. Why and, more importantly, how can we make anti-corruption policies more systematic, objective, effective, and sustainable? In this presentation, I zoom into the case of the most successful case globally of the anti-corruption efforts, Romania, and show why the current Romanian anti-corruption model is ultimately bound to fail. I then zoom out into a comparative analysis across all the EU member states and propose an alternative analytical approach - a theory-, data- and evidence-based approach, that can help investigators and policy makers at local, national and European levels alike, pursue anticorruption in a more effective way. I finish the presentation with a sanity check of the proposed approach and a thought-provoking call to action.

Closing - Oscar Granados

ORGANIZERs

ABOUT NETSCI2020

NetSci is the flagship conference of the Network Science Society, which aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners working in the emerging research area of network science.

NetSci fosters multi-disciplinary communication and collaboration in network science research across computer and information sciences, physics, mathematics, statistics, the life sciences, medicine, food science, neuroscience, environmental sciences, social sciences, finance and business, arts and design.

past editions

2019 - Mini-symposium at the Latin American Conference on Complex Networks, Cartagena, Colombia.