Insights from behavioural science are increasingly making their way into integrity policymaking. A behavioural approach acknowledges that behind the policies, laws, regulations, and tools there are human beings making decisions. Sometimes, these decisions are not aligned with what policies aim to achieve, undermining their effectiveness and impact.

Under its Anti-Corruption Policy for 2019-2023, the Slovak Republic made corruption risk management a cornerstone of its strategic efforts to combat corruption and promote public integrity. This report focuses on the challenges faced in implementing corruption risk management practices from a behavioural perspective and proposes concrete avenues for increasing communication about corruption risks in the Slovak public administration.

An effective risk management system is dependent on the behaviours of several stakeholders and public servants’ commitment. To improve corruption risk management in the Slovak public sector, the OECD identified the behaviours that hinder an effective corruption risk management and analysed the barriers and enablers of these behaviours in a diagnostic analysis, following the application of the OECD BASIC framework. The key behaviour identified in a diagnostic analysis was that employees are not communicating about potential corruption risks as often as they should. Reasons for limited risk communication include a lack of support from leaders, a lack of feeling of safety when communicating about risks and a lack of awareness of how to communicate risks.

Two behaviourally informed strategies were designed to increase risk communication. The effects of these two strategies were tested in an online randomised controlled trial (RCT). In addition, the relationships between the likelihood of communicating a risk and several secondary outcome variables, such as psychological safety, knowledge on the reporting channels and trust, were also explored. The results indicate that exposing employees to examples of exemplary leadership and social norms can increase the likelihood of communicating a corruption risk. Feeling generally safe when communicating about risks, having hiring responsibility, and having trust and knowledge of reporting channels also play an important role in improving risk communication.

One of the central measures set out in the Anti-Corruption Policy of the Slovak Republic for the years 2019-2023 is to strengthen the identification and mitigation of corruption risks across the Slovak public sector. The experimental findings demonstrate the potential of applying behavioural insights to enhance already-existing corruption risk management policies. Both the intervention appealing to leadership, and the one supporting a better understanding of risks, when coupled with social norms messaging, significantly improved the likelihood of communicating integrity risks. This chapter outlines the recommendations that emerged from the analysis and experimental findings.