Applying Behavioural Science in the Italian Public Administration

8. BPA for public sector integrity

Abstract

This chapter describes how behavioural science can promote public sector integrity. Corruption and whistleblowing are behaviours shaped by uncertainty, social norms, moral cues, and organisational culture, not just rational cost-benefit calculations. International case studies show that behavioural practices – such as simplifying procedures, using norms carefully, and reinforcing ethical leadership – can help civil servants to act with integrity and raise concerns where they may occur. These behavioural practices are most effective when they’re embedded in a culture that makes ethical behaviour visible, safe and normal.

Key messages

• Increase the visibility of both ethical and unethical acts and publicly reinforce norms after breaches. Use investigations and sanctions as an opportunity to communicate that rules matter and that whistleblowers’ efforts cause positive change. This salience deters misconduct and reassures potential whistleblowers to come forward because it’s clear that their actions can make a difference. This can help to strengthen deterrence and positive role modelling. However, only raise the salience of unethical acts as teachable moments that highlight their aberrancy without reinforcing a negative descriptive social norm.

• Make the process certain. Publish a clear, step-by-step reporting pathway clarifying how to whistle blow, who is responsible, and the timelines involved. Civil servants may experience ambiguity aversion, the tendency to favour the known over the unknown, such as the known risk of staying quiet over the unknown risk of whistleblowing. Reduce civil servants’ uncertainty by communicating clearly what whistleblowing involves and the protections for doing so.

• Move beyond the “rules and punishment” approach. It is important to consider the cognitive biases and social influences that drive misconduct. This can take the form of using social norms and moral prompts, framing whistleblowing as pro-social, ensuring that there are honourary or status-based awards for whistleblowing and reporting corrupt conduct

• Foster civil servants’ identification with the public interest. Use leadership to model ethical behaviour and to communicate that all civil servants are expected to uphold public sector values and serve the public interest. Frame whistleblowing as an act of loyalty to these values, not a betrayal of colleagues engaged in corruption.

• Foster an open culture that normalises “speaking up”. Train leaders and teams to discuss ethical concerns without stigma. Acknowledge that whistleblowers feel pressure to be “loyal” to the group. This also includes building integrity skills and resilience through ongoing capacity development and the creation of networks of integrity leaders.

Why it matters

In 2022, the Belgian police seized over EUR 1.5 million as part of the “Qatargate” corruption scandal (Costa, 2024[1]). In 2006, an investigation by the Munich Public Prosecutor found Siemens, a major electrical engineering corporation, had bribed foreign officials (Berghoff, 2017[2]). In the 1990s, the Italian judiciary investigation, known as “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands), uncovered a pervasive system of political and administrative corruption involving entrepreneurs, public officials, and politicians (della Porta and Vannucci, 2016[3]). Acts of corruption differ in their details but combatting them shares common principles. These are articulated in the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Public Integrity [OECD/LEGAL/0435] which recommends governments adopt an anti-corruption approach built on:

• Systems of coherent and comprehensive public integrity, characterised by high commitment, clear responsibilities and co-ordination, high standards of expected behaviour, and an evidence-informed approach.

• Cultures of public integrity that promote a whole-of-society and merit-based culture of public integrity that is not limited to the public sector, invest in integrity leadership and training for public officials, and support open organisational cultures.

• Accountability through internal control and risk management, ensuring the effectiveness of enforcement mechanisms, reinforcing the role of external oversight and control, and encouraging transparency and stakeholder engagement.

Despite anti-corruption and integrity frameworks becoming increasingly detailed, their implementation is often inadequate. Especially in areas such as managing conflict of interest, lobbying or integrity risk management, this gap between the quality of the frameworks and the de facto implementation can be significant. Innovative approaches, such as behavioural science, can improve practices and decrease integrity risks. For example, behavioural interventions can simplify procedures, train integrity leaders or empower citizen engagement, supporting a culture of integrity and effective accountability.

Integrity and anticorruption go hand in hand, ensuring the stability of public service and safeguarding democracy. Anticorruption is no longer pursued in isolation, instead it is part of a broader strategy to promote transparency, accountability and good governance in the public sector. For example, Italy has built a coherent and comprehensive public integrity system through reforms such as Law 190/2012 and the establishment of ANAC (Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority), promoting prevention, transparency, and oversight beyond criminal enforcement. The ongoing development of the PIAO (Integrated Activity and Organisation Plan) integrates integrity into a broader system of performance management and organisational culture, in line with the OECD recommendations.

In many countries, traditional “hard” strategies are already stringent. Here, the challenge is not a lack of laws but the daily decisions that influence public officials’ behaviour. Legislation and enforcement are essential, but they might overlook the ambiguity, social pressure, and behavioural barriers that shape officials’ decision-making. Behavioural science complements hard tools by improving compliance with existing rules, increasing detection, and protecting trust.

Whom it involves

• Anti-corruption bodies, such as anti-corruption commissions and investigation bureaus, as well as integrity units within public administrations, including ethics offices and risk management units. These are responsible for investigating corrupt conduct, promoting whistleblowing.

• Supreme audit institutions and spending oversight bodies, such as courts of audit, auditors-general and national audit offices responsible, responsible for the probity of government spending, detecting irregularities and identifying weaknesses in spending oversight.

• Public officers, such as in the health, financial, construction and infrastructure, defence and security, and sports sectors. These actors are responsible for the transparency of public spending.

How to improve integrity

The following behavioural approaches to integrity and anti-corruption are based on moderate-to-high quality evidence. Most practices are based on country-level reform studies and on high quality experimental evidence. However, some studies were done in laboratories and may not generalise to public administration. These practices are promising but rated as moderate quality because they have not all been assessed for generalisability, scalability or long-term impact.

Go beyond the rational-choice model of behaviour change

Corruption was historically studied under the rational-choice model. It assumed individuals weigh the expected costs and benefits of corrupt acts, leading to policies focused on surveillance, enforcement and punishment (Becker, 1968[4]). These frameworks have their place, but behavioural science has shown that unethical behaviour is often driven by psychological noise, “bounded rationality”, and social influences. Behavioural public administration can foster transparency and efficiency in public services, aligning public officials’ behaviour with the ethical expectations of the public (Hortal and Pérez Martínez, 2024[5]). The report Behavioural Insights for Public Integrity examined how behavioural science can align integrity policy with how people behave in real-world contexts (OECD, 2018[6]). These insights that go beyond the rational-choice model can make integrity and anti-corruption within public administrations more effective.

Box 8.1. Case study: Simplifying public administration to reduce corruption in Romania

In 2023 the OECD and Romania’s Ministry of Justice examined why the legally mandated corruption-risk methodology (Decision 599/2018) was under-used and prone to tick-the-box compliance. The OECD conducted interviews and focus groups to build a behavioural flowchart for civil servants who followed the corruption-risk methodology. The flowchart showed that methodology was complex, requiring at least 22 discrete behaviours across seven steps. It was also mentally demanding, prompting civil servants to rely on heuristics and “rules-of-thumb” to progress. This complexity meant that the corruption risk-methodology was followed inconsistently. The OECD found that behavioural techniques could improve the corruption-risk methodology, namely to:

• Add three columns to the risk register template: actions, outputs, and results (with timeframes). These additions nudged users to build a theory-of-change model to reduce corruption rather than defaulting to generic solutions like “training” with unspecified timelines.

• Share a brief user guide with key definitions, explained impact and likelihood, and teaches step-by-step intervention logic.

• Create a simple web-app to pre-fill risk history and standardise checklists. The web app helped users start from suggested evidence instead of a blank page.

• Create a dedicated integrity unit, lowering the barrier for users to seek help and promoting consistent best- practice across teams.

These techniques and simplifications can help civil servants follow corruption and risk processes. They apply behavioural science to make the right behaviour easy, simplify workflows and build feedback into tools. This helps civil servants to comply with anti-corruption policies.

Source: (OECD, 2023[7]).

Use social norms to promote integrity

Public administrations can prompt moral reflection and social norms to promote ethical behaviour. For example, a field trial in the UK to reduce tax non-compliance found that telling non-payers “Nine out of ten people in the UK pay their tax on time. You are currently in the very small minority of people who have not paid us yet” increased the share who paid by 4.9% relative to a control (Hallsworth et al., 2014[8]). This intervention used descriptive norms about how people do behave to show non-compliers how aberrant they were, motivating them to change their behaviour and comply.

However, descriptive social norms can backfire. Describing commonplace non-compliance can normalise non-compliance. For example, online platforms like ipaidabribe.com let people report bribes they were asked to pay, but sites like this raise the salience of corruption which may normalise bribery (Van Aaken, 2024[9]). A better approach may to report “I refused to pay a bribe”, to raise the salience of prosecution for bribery, or invoking injunctive norms – norms about how people are expected behave.

Injunctive messages may be more effective when they highlight public and government rejection of corruption. Their impact also depends on targeting the messages to the right audience, and for these to be delivered by trusted people (i.e., messenger effect), while also being embedded in a broader set of anti-corruption reforms and initiatives (Peiffer and Cheeseman, 2023[10]). For example, a lab trial in South Africa told participants, acting as citizens and public officials, they could either follow legal procedures or engage in bribery. In one condition, a poster was displayed suggesting that bribery was becoming less common in the community – an injunctive norm towards less corruption. This message reduced both the perceived prevalence and actual occurrence of bribery. The share of participants who offered a bribe fell from 25.1% to 21%, and who accepted a bribe from 41.2% to 30% (Köbis et al., 2022[11]).

A well-chosen norm can encourage ethical behaviour even amidst systemic non-compliance. In the UK example, there was a strong descriptive norm in favour of tax compliance. In the example from South Africa, researchers used injunctive norms to convey that corruption was decreasing. This demonstrates the need to adapt norms to different contexts for them to be effective.

Foster the behavioural pre-conditions of whistleblowing

Whether public sector whistleblowers come forward depends on behavioural factors. Many whistleblowers hesitate because of fear of retaliation, uncertainty, pressure to conform, and doubts that their effort will lead to change. Individuals often remain silent if whistleblowing entails being fired, threatened, becoming the victim of retaliation, or considered a traitor (Watts and Buckley, 2017[12]). Organisational barriers can deter whistleblowing, including rewards for silence, punishment for reporting, and inadequate reporting channels (Berry, 2004[13]). Whistleblowers can be deterred by uncertainty on how to report corruption, their anonymity, and the belief that nothing will be done (Transperancy International, 2025[14]). Public administrations can create the behavioural preconditions for civil servants to be whistleblowers by doing the following:

• Make the process certain. Publish a clear, step-by-step reporting pathway clarifying how to whistle blow, who is responsible, and the timelines involved. Civil servants may experience ambiguity aversion, the tendency to favour the known over the unknown, such as the known risk of staying quiet over the unknown risk of whistleblowing. Reduce civil servant’s uncertainty by communicating clearly what whistleblowing involves and the protections for doing so (OECD, 2018[6]).

• Frame whistleblowing as pro-social. Ensure there are honourary or status-based awards for whistleblowing and reporting corrupt conduct. Be careful when offering cash rewards which can crowd out intrinsic motives and may create perverse incentives (OECD, 2018[6]).

• Foster civil servants’ identification with the public interest. Communicate that all civil servants are expected to uphold public sector values and serve the public interest. Frame whistleblowing as an act of loyalty to these values, not a betrayal of colleagues engaged in corruption. Research suggests that identification with a broader purpose, whose values have been violated by a given team’s corrupt behaviour, increases willingness to whistle blow (Anvari et al., 2019[15]).

• Foster an open culture that normalises “speaking up”. Train leaders and teams to discuss ethical concerns without stigma. Acknowledge that whistleblowers feel pressure to be “loyal” to the group. Communicate that there are no repercussions for reporting “false positive” integrity concerns (OECD, 2018[6]).

• Publicly reinforce norms after breaches. Use investigations and sanctions as an opportunity to communicate that rules matter and that whistleblower’s efforts cause positive change. This salience deters misconduct and reassures potential whistleblowers to come forward because it’s clear that their actions can make a difference (OECD, 2018[6]).

Have leaders drive organisational culture and integrity

Public sector leaders are essential to promote integrity. Leaders act as role models by speaking up against unethical behaviours, developing high-quality relationships with their subordinates, and regard whistleblowers as helpful to the organisation, thus reducing the risk of retaliation (Cheng, Bai and Yang, 2017[16]). For example, the OECD worked with Brazil’s Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) in charge of integrity policy at the federal level to promote integrity leadership and an open organisational culture in the Brazilian public administration through behavioural science (OECD, 2023[17]). It found that leaders were essential to promote an open organisational culture by setting the right example, discussing integrity norms and values with civil servants, advising them on integrity challenges and serving as a listening point (OECD, 2023[17]).

Box 8.2. Case study: Behavioural interventions increased reporting of corruption risk in Slovakia

The OECD partnered with the Corruption Prevention Department of the Government Office of the Slovak Republic to help civil servants follow corruption risk management process. The researchers ran an online RCT to encourage civil servants to report perceived corrupt behaviour. Participants were shown a vignette describing a hiring situation with a risk of corruption. After the vignette, participants saw one of three messages: a control group who received no message; a treatment that helped participants understand corruption by communicating a norm in favour of reporting it and likening corruption to a sickness; or a treatment that asked participants to imagine their managers were leading by example to fight corruption.

Both treatments were associated with more participants raising corruption risks. In the control group only 48% of participants indicated that they saw a risk, while 57% of those who were helped to understand corruption did so (p < .05), and 62% who were asked to imagine their leadership opposing corruption did so (p < .05). The study highlighted how employees often do not communicate corruption risks due to lack of support from leaders, lack of feelings of safety, and lack of awareness on how to communicate risks. Integrity teams seeking to encourage civil servants to report perceived risks of corruption may wish to recruit leaders who communicate the importance of reporting corruption and convey that it is safe to do so.

Source: (OECD, 2024[18]).

Use moral prompts and reminders to change behaviour

Moral prompts are nudges that remind people of appropriate behavior and activate moral standards before they might act dishonestly. Research suggests that moral prompts can be effective. For example, public officials who signed a short pledge of honesty before using their discretionary power behaved more ethically (Lambsdorff, 2015[19]). Similar prompts could be used in public sector processes, for instance, when public officials complete official forms or declarations.

Behavioural scientists have developed moral prompts to promote ethical reflection. One innovation by the Indian NGO 5th Pillar was a “zero-rupee” note to combat petty corruption. Resembling real currency, the note is printed with anti-corruption messages such as “I promise to neither accept nor give a bribe,” and citizens hand the note to public officials who solicit bribes. The citizens handing them notes with anti-corruption messages instead of paying the bribe encourages officials to engage in self-reflection and reconsider their ethical stance. Since its introduction in 2007, millions of zero-rupee notes have been distributed across India, helping to raise public awareness and promote ethical behaviour in everyday interactions (World Bank, 2015[20]). Beyond empowering individuals, the initiative also serves as a visible signal that tolerance for corruption is decreasing, which can discourage corrupt behaviour.

Box 8.3. Case study: Behavioural reminders increased gift reporting in Mexico

Under Mexico’s Federal Law of the Responsibilities of Public Servants, officials must report and return gifts valued over ten-times the minimum wage. The regulation aims to prevent conflicts of interest, but compliance remains low. Therefore, the Ministry of Public Service (SFP) partnered with researchers to test whether behaviourally informed messages could nudge public servants toward greater compliance (Gomez-García and Soto-Mota, 2017[21]). From December 2016 to February 2017, researchers sent emails to over 175 600 federal public servants. Recipients were randomised to receive either no email (control) or one of five behaviourally informed emails:

• Legal: “By Law, you are obliged to inform and turn over the gifts that you are given throughout the year. Fulfill your obligation!”

• Impartiality: “Receiving gift compromises your impartiality as a public servant. If someone gave you a gift, you must inform and turn over it.”

• Honesty: “We recognize your honesty as a public servant! Remember that you must inform and turn over the gifts you get throughout the year. Show your honesty!”

• Social: “Every year, your teammates inform and turn over, on average, 1000 gifts. Do the same! We trust you!”

• Sanction: “Watch out! If someone gives you a gift and you don't inform not turn over it, someone else could tell. Don't get sanctioned!”

The behavioural messages worked. Public servants who received any message were more likely to report gifts compared to a control group who received no emails. The most effective messages were Legal, where 17 respondents reported MXN 298 962 in gifts (p < .05), and Impartiality, where 14 reported MXN 54 791 in gifts (p < .1), compared to one gift of MXN 28 782 reported in the control group. The results illustrate how moral prompts can cost-effectively improve compliance with integrity policies.

Source: (Gomez-García and Soto-Mota, 2017[21]).

Behaviourally informed insights

• Integrity systems are more effective when they reflect how people actually behave. Laws and regulations are necessary but not sufficient. Behavioural tools (such as simplifying procedures, using nudges and moral prompts) are not a substitute for these, but complementary tools that enable officials to use them in real decision-making contexts. Context is also important: behavioural strategies must be adapted to local cultures, organisational norms, and sector risks.

• Organisational culture, social norms, and leadership are essential to integrity. Integrity is sustained when ethical behaviours are visible and reinforced as the norm, while anti-social behaviours are punished. Leaders at all levels must act as role models by engaging in regular conversation, showing visible commitment and a trust-based relationship with employees. A safe, transparent, and supported whistleblowing environment for whistleblowing is also essential

For further reading on how to use behavioural science to improve integrity, see for example: Behavioural Changes Against Corruption (Zúñiga, 2018[22]); Bridging the gap: How behavioural science can strengthen anti-corruption and crime prevention (Camargo, 2025[23]); Behavioural insights and anti-corruption: A practitioner-tailored review of the latest evidence (2016–2022) (Stahl, 2022[24]); Behavioral science introduction for addressing corruption’s impact on the environment (Camargo, 2024[25]); How can a behavioral science lens reduce corruption? (BIT, 2024[26]).

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