17th IACC

The Proxy Challenge Competition was launched in 2013 to help aid-donors better assess the results of their support to anti-corruption reforms. Unless we can find reasonably reliable ways to measure reform effects on corruption, it will be increasingly difficult to motivate continued support to anti-corruption reforms. The demands for donor effectiveness and value for money keep the pressure high on improving the measurement of anti-corruption reform effects. 

In 2014, the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre ran the first edition of the challenge, and brought together a body of promising, bespoke proxy indicators. In this second round, we still aim to find the best proxy indicators that can track progress of anti-corruption reform initiatives. We need reliable, intuitive, accessible, and cost-effective assessment methods that are useful across country-contexts.

The Proxy Challenge Review Panel of experienced anti-corruption practitioners and academics have evaluated all the submitted proposals and identified the two contributions that best meet the submission requirements. In this session moderated by U4, Matthew Stephenson (Professor of Law at Harvard Law School) will give an overview over the status in measuring progress in anti-corruption reforms before the authors of the two best submissions present their respective proposals. Elizabeth Hart (International Development Researcher, Trainer & Consultant, independent) and Caryn Peiffer (Research Fellow at International Development Department, University of Birmingham) will announce the Review Panel assessment for the respective proposals before a winner is announced. The session closes with an appeal by Paul Heywood for innovation with a view to Proxy Challenge III.

The two best contributions are:

The percentage of traffic court cases resolved within expected time standards as an indicator of anti-corruption reform results in the justice sector, co-authored by Violaine Autheman, John Cipperly and Ehrik Aldana. The submission will be presented by John Cipperly and Ehrik Aldana.   

Measuring Corrupt Rent Extraction by Tracking the Misuse of Corporate Vehicles, written by Mihály Fazekas and Bence Tóth, who both will be presenting their contribution.  


Speakers (review panel)

Elizabeth Hart is an international development researcher, policy analyst, and practitioner with more than 20 years experience in the field of anti-corruption, good governance and democratic development. She is currently an independent consultant and researcher based in Seattle. Until January 2013, she was Director of the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre in Bergen, Norway. Previously, Dr. Hart had a 14-year career with the US Agency for International Development, working on good governance, anti-corruption, civil society, and democratic development. She served for four years as USAID's democracy and governance advisor in Nigeria immediately after the transition to democratic rule in 1999, and for six years as USAID's lead anti-corruption advisor in Washington. She has worked and traveled extensively throughout Africa, Asia and Europe. Dr. Hart holds a Bachelor’s degree from Whitman College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Caryn Peiffer is a Research Fellow for the Developmental Leadership Program in the International Development Department. A political scientist by training, her main research interests lie in the causes, consequences and measurements of corruption and anticorruption reforms, developmental state business relations, and political accountability. Most recently, she co-authored (with Richard Rose) Paying Bribes for Public Services: A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. She has published other works on vulnerability to bribery, wiliness to report corruption, the theoretical foundations of effective anticorruption reforms, democratic accountability in Africa, the relationship between identity and attitudes towards aid, and the determinants of foreign aid flows. She has also carried out research for Transparency International, DFID, AFD, and SIDA, worked in India, Zambia and Botswana, and has advised the Commonwealth Secretariat and Cabinet Office on corruption research.

Matthew Stephenson is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches administrative law, legislation and regulation, anti-corruption law, and political economy of public law. His research focuses on the application of positive political theory to public law, particularly in the areas of administrative procedure, anti-corruption, judicial institutions, and separation of powers. Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Professor Stephenson clerked for Senior Judge Stephen Williams on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. He received his J.D. and Ph.D. (political science) from Harvard in 2003, and his B.A. from Harvard College in 1997.

Professor Paul M Heywood holds the Sir Francis Hill Chair of European Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research focuses on political corruption, institutional design and state capacity, and he is author, co-author or editor of eighteen books and more than eighty journal articles and book chapters. Recent funded research includes an ESRC/Hong Kong RGC project on Integrity Management in the UK, HK and China; an EU FP7 project, ANTICORRP, on anti-corruption policies; and TACOD, an EU project on tackling corruption through open data. Heywood is currently leader of a £3.6m British Academy/DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (2015-18), designed to identify new initiatives that can help developing countries tackle the scourge of corruption and the negative impact it has on millions of people's lives.  He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Trustee of Transparency International UK. 

  
Speakers (the contenders)

Ehrik Aldana is a Political Science Research Assistant with the National Center for State Courts, where he researches anticorruption measurement and reform, as well as domestic language access services in the courts. His research interests include access to justice, inequality, and the intersection between law, technology, and public policy. Previously, he worked as an intern at the Public Defender’s Office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He currently studies Political Science at Yale University.

John Cipperly is a Judicial Reform and Government Accountability Program Manager with the National Center for State Courts. He has more than a decade of experience working to promote transparent and accountable governance and effective justice systems. He has designed and managed justice sector reform programs in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe. With a focus on citizen engagement in justice sector reform, he has developed and produced print and televised media, web platforms, social media campaigns, and primary and secondary civic education curriculum, including graphic novels and coloring books to promote civic engagement and legal literacy. His research interests include the measurement of judicial transparency, public trust and confidence in the justice system, and procedural fairness.  He holds an M.A. in Sociology of Law from the International Institute for Sociology of Law, a B.A. in Linguistics and Hispanic Studies from the College of William and Mary. 

Dr. Mihály Fazekas is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. He has been pioneering the use of ‘Big Data’ for social sciences research, especially for measuring and analysing corruption and administrative quality across Europe. He uses mixed research methods while working in interdisciplinary teams of IT specialists, practitioners, and social scientists in order to collect, structure, and clean large administrative datasets generated by governments. One of his primary areas of work is public procurement and high-level corruption. Together with István János Tóth, Fazekas won the first Proxy Challenge in 2014 and published the U4 Breif entitled New ways to measure institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement.

Bence Tóth is a research assistant in “The Digital Whistleblower. Fiscal Transparency, Risk Assessment and Impact of Good Governance Policies Assessed” (DIGIWHIST) research project. He assists in a large-scale data collection exercise focusing on public procurement. Furthermore, he is also involved in different public procurement related research projects, e.g. empirical analysis of the connection between transparency and efficiency or corruption and collusion detection in PP markets.