Despite three decades of unprecedented investment in anti-corruption reforms, we still know remarkably little about which interventions work, under what conditions, and through which mechanisms. Governments continue to introduce anti-corruption agencies, transparency requirements, integrity systems, ethics regulations and oversight mechanisms, yet evidence of their effectiveness remains fragmented and inconclusive. This raises a fundamental question: why do anti-corruption reforms continue to proliferate despite persistent uncertainty about their impact?
This panel examines anti-corruption through the lens of symbolic governance. (Anti-)corruption is a valence issue: policymakers are expected to act decisively, yet often have limited knowledge about its causes or effective interventions. Under uncertainty and political pressure, governments may adopt visible reforms whose symbolic value exceeds their transformative capacity. Rather than classifying policies as successful or unsuccessful, we ask what broader functions reforms perform: signalling commitment, responding to public demands, satisfying international expectations, enhancing legitimacy, or avoiding blame. Symbolic governance therefore emerges not simply from opportunism or deliberate window-dressing, but from the interaction between uncertainty, institutional constraints, limited capacity, and the political necessity of appearing to act.
The panel also revisits Myrdal’s concept of (anti-)corruption folklore: the circulation of uncritical beliefs and moralising policy narratives that acquire conventional wisdom status despite limited empirical evidence. We bring this perspective into dialogue with theories of symbolic politics, performative regulation and evidence-based policymaking, as well as Merton’s manifest and latent functions, Meyer and Rowan’s institutional decoupling, Lipsky’s implementation theory, and scholarship on policy learning and diffusion. We understand institutional isomorphism, policy churn and implementation gaps as interconnected features of anti-corruption governance under uncertainty.
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions, with particular interest in interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approaches, addressing:
• symbolic governance, legitimacy and political incentives;
• policy learning, policy transfer and diffusion of anti-corruption reforms;
• anti-corruption institutions, regulation and compliance;
• implementation, institutional decoupling and policy effectiveness;
• comparative and methodological approaches to evaluating reforms.
The organisers aim to foster broad geographical, gender and career-stage diversity and to develop a collective publication following the Congress. Papers should be presented in English.