Citizens perception of corruption in Flanders: how to understand inter-group variations?

Comparison between citizens and police officers perceptions of corruption Perceptions of corruption, citizens, police officers During an in-depth search for news reports on corruption we observed that various situations are judged corrupt. Based on a query with search terms like corruption, bribery, fiddling within the Flemish Digital Press Database ‘Mediargus’ (period 1995 – 2009) we received over 15.000 articles reporting on corruption in the broadest sense. Out of these we selected a set of meaningful situations and constructed a scenario based questionnaire to be scored on a scale ranging from ‘totally corrupt’ to ‘totally not corrupt’. This questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 2.256 Flemish citizens and to officers working at the Belgian Polices’ Central Office for the Repression of Corruption, 14 Flemish departments of the Federal Judicial Police and a sample of local police forces. Findings on the comparison between citizens and police officers perceptions of corruption are presented here