Who are we?
PICEC is a 17-member interdisciplinary research group which includes Modern History Professor Emeritus Borja de Riquer, Law Professor Emerita Maria Jesús Espuny; Modern History Lecturer Gemma Rubí, principal investigator of a project about corruption history in modern Spain; Early Modern History Lecturer Javier Antón, principal investigator of a project about familial letters; Remei Perpinyà, coordinator of a work group on document management for a more transparent administration and lecturer at Escola Superior d’Arxivística i Gestió Documental; Constitutional Law Professor and former director of Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials Joan Lluís Pérez Francesch and Modern History Lecturer and SGR PICEC director Lluís Ferran Toledano. Other Spanish and European researchers about the History of Corruption, Public Administration Transparency and Political Clientelism made contributions to PICEC on matters related to the last three centuries.
What are we researching?
PICEC has an aspiration to become one of the main Spanish interdisciplinary groups on the so-called New History of Political Corruption within the European research networks. One of its main goals is to build a big database on political corruption which in its first stage must contain comprehensive information about every scandal which happened in Spain between the late 18th century and current times. This effort is correlated with that of other European teams in order to ultimately build a big continental database.
The project requires to synthesize all the information about corruption cases which can be identified from a huge amount of different sources (historical, juridical, political, administrative) and to indicate the persons, the political parties, the public administrations and the private corporations which are complicated in every scandal, because these informations are needed in order to analyze both the political and social impact and the historical importance of the affair. These data ought to be complemented with information about the different political, judicial and administrative tools and proceedings to fight corruption and their evolution and degree of efectiveness during these two centuries.
A thesaurus to describe and to justify our selection on political corruption typologies has also been created through the research process.
Our strategic research lines are essentially the following:
- Political clientelism and electoral corruption.
- Speeches, Good Cause and practices of political corruption.
- Juridical history of political corruption.
- Governance, transparency, civic values and rule of law.
The research group
The turning point in our research group was the establishment of SGR Grup d’Història del Parlamentarisme under the direction of Dr. Borja de Riquer, government-funded in 2005 and again in 2009. One of its goals was the coordination of biographical dictionaries of Catalan and Spanish MPs (DBPC and DBPE) and the establishment of European and Latin American networks of researchers specialized in parliamentary history.
The new government-funded SGR 2017, directed first by the late Antoni Moliner and then by Lluís Ferran Toledano, was accompanied with the obtainment of the project HAR2017-86545-P “La corrupción política en la España contemporánea en perspectiva comparada. Bases de datos, cartografía y análisis histórico (1810-2016)” with Gemma Rubí as principal investigator. Inside PICEC there is also the workgroup 2017-2019 “Gestión de documentos para administraciones más transparentes” coordinated by Remei Perpinyà and the project HAR2016-76560-P directed by Javier Antón Pelayo which explores the existence of clientele networks and their relation with moral understandings in private spaces through epistolary sources.
Lecturer Gemma Rubí represents PICEC in the International Scientific Coordination Network (GDRI) Politics and corruption, wherefrom we are cofounding partners along with Drs. Frédéric Monier (Centre Norbert Elias EHSS) and Jens Ivo Engels (Technischen Universität Darmstadt).