Universality of political corruption networks

Hanley, Q ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8189-9550, Martins, AF, da Cunha, BR, Gonçalves, S, Perc, M and Ribeiro, HV, 2022. Universality of political corruption networks. Scientific Reports, 12: 6858.

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Abstract

Corruption crimes demand highly coordinated actions among criminal agents to succeed. But research dedicated to corruption networks is still in its infancy and indeed little is known about the properties of these networks. Here we present a comprehensive investigation of corruption networks related to political scandals in Spain and Brazil over nearly three decades. We show that corruption networks of both countries share universal structural and dynamical properties, including similar degree distributions, clustering and assortativity coefficients, modular structure, and a growth process that is marked by the coalescence of network components due to a few recidivist criminals. We propose a simple model that not only reproduces these empirical properties but reveals also that corruption networks operate near a critical recidivism rate below which the network is entirely fragmented and above which it is overly connected. Our research thus indicates that actions focused on decreasing corruption recidivism may substantially mitigate this type of organized crime.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Scientific Reports
Creators:	Hanley, Q., Martins, A.F., da Cunha, B.R., Gonçalves, S., Perc, M. and Ribeiro, H.V.
Publisher:	Nature Research (part of Springer Nature)
Date:	2022
Volume:	12
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/s41598-022-10909-2 DOI 1538803 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	21 Apr 2022 10:23
Last Modified:	18 Aug 2022 14:26
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/46152

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