Although public sector corruption is recognized as a threat also to advanced democracies, little comparative research addresses the determinants of actual corruption. This limits our theoretical and empirical understanding of the underlying drivers of different variants of non-systemic corruption. This paper studies “face mask scandals”—corruption scandals related to the public procurement of personal protective equipment—during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the European Union (EU). It asks: why did corruption occur in some contexts, but not in others? Based on the corruption hexagon model, we theorize corruption as the result of the interplay of six set of factors reflecting, context, circumstances of corruption, personal characteristics, and rationalization. Using secondary and primary data on 39 irregularities reported in face mask procurement in 17 countries with good enough evidence that corruption could have been uncovered, we will use fuzzy -set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) and targeted case studies to identify underlying determinants of actual, non-systemic corruption during crisis.
