Today’s guest post is from Joe Grady, a co-founder of the Topos Partnership, a firm that specializes in public opinion research:

Public backing is critical to the success of anticorruption reform efforts. Yet communications intended to mobilize the public against corruption often backfire, making audiences less engaged and less confident the problem can be solved. To better understand this problem, the Open Society Foundations recently sponsored an international research effort led by the Topos Partnership to better understand how residents of three countries—the United States, North Macedonia, and Brazil—think about corruption in the public sphere, and how best to engage them in efforts to combat the problem. In each country, ethnographers spoke at length with roughly 150 people, followed by internet surveys testing different kinds of messages.

Not surprisingly, findings across the countries are distinct in various interesting ways. Macedonians, for example, often have a sense that their country lags behind other European countries, and they may also look back nostalgically at the Yugoslav era when things seemed to run more predictably. Brazilians see themselves as being culturally averse to rigid rules and procedures, including those that keep government “honest.” The U.S. public has a strong sense that government is supposed to be by and for the people. But despite these important differences, there are also important similarities across the three countries. Continue reading →