The project brings an innovative approach to H2020 societal challenges 6 and 7 by advancing fundamental and applied research on corruption and its implications for the quality of democracy through a mass survey and lab experiments and by sharing this knowledge with targeted stakeholders and citizens at large. Through a combination of research excellence and strategic advocacy coalitions, the project contributes to greater public awareness about corruption and to enhance the resilience of democracy. There is a growing debate about the danger of deconsolidation in many countries, i.e. citizens becoming dissatisfied with democracy and increasingly open to nondemocratic alternatives ^[2][3]. This trend has been more sensitive in bailout countries like Portugal ^[1]. Support for democracy has been seriously questioned in terms of the idea of democracy and the values underpinning its governance (diffuse); the performance of its institutions (specific); and the incumbent's decisions and actions (reasoned) [4]. Although there is a vast literature on economic (outcome-oriented) and institutional (process-oriented) predictors of political support, little has been said regarding their interaction and how it accounts for multiple combinations of these three interrelated levels. The project's main thesis is that in contexts of economic crisis, citizens become particularly sensitive to corruption, especially that affecting political actors, institutions, and processes ^[5][6][7] and when exposed to the problem's salience in society, their judgements are more likely to express a system-oriented ('sociotropic') rather than individual-oriented ('pocketbook') understanding of the phenomenon ^[8]. The general objective of this study is to analyse, using both observational and experimental data, how economic outcomes, real and perceived, can impact upon citizens' ethical standards, in particular those regulating their relationship with politics and notions of procedural fairness, and how these, in turn, may help explaining levels and gradients of political support in democracy.

More specifically, the project objectives are threefold:

1) Consolidation - to consolidate knowledge on citizens' attitudes, perceptions and experiences of corruption by tacking stock of the findings of the FCT-funded 2006 mass survey [POCI/ CPO/60031/2004] and replicating some of its core questions in order to evaluate tendencies before and after the crisis;

2) Innovation - to advance knowledge in this field at the theoretical level and in terms of the measurement of procedural perceptions and political support;

3) Validation - to offer a testing ground for survey methods and techniques. 

The project will make use of new experimental methods to overcome some of the problems that are recurrent when using surveys to study normative issues, such as the issue of social desirability or untruthful answers and to test the causeeffect relationships in different social groups and political targets.