PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION FND INTERPRETING CORRUPTION RISKS IN MODERN SCIENTIFIC LITTERATURE AND OF THE REGULATORY LEGAL ACTS OF UKRAINE
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine, POGORILYI Iaroslav 
Published: November 2024

Background . These days, the fight against corruption, its causes, consequences, and prerequisites has become a systemic and crucial part of state power policy and public administration activities due to the threatening nature of corruption processes in Ukraine and the risks associated with them, particularly during times of war. Such social challenges require intensification of the processes of development and practical implementation of an effective set of anti-corruption measures, as well as improvement of their institutional and regulatory support, which, in turn, requires further intensification of multi-disciplinary scientific research into conditions, determinants and incentives for the emergence and spread of corruption phenomena, development of adequate to current realities theoretical and methodological foundations for increasing the effectiveness of the state anti-corruption strategy, improving its regulatory and legal framework, optimizing the methodology and methods of assessing corruption risks by authorized bodies in the field of public administration. The aim of the article is to provide coverage of the results of the study of pressing problems, ideational-theoretical foundations, methodological basis, and specifics of disciplinary guidelines of scientific-theoretical study, as well as determination of the nature of corruption risks and features of their interpretation in the regulatory requirements of the current anticorruption legislation of Ukraine and methodological and methodical recommendations of other Ukrainian regulatory documents; justification of the need to introduce improvements to the ideational-theoretical and methodological foundations of the analysis and methodology for assessing the factors of corruption in the system of public administration bodies, as well as the correction of the connotations of the traditional conceptual apparatus of cognition and the conceptual explanation of the nature of corruption phenomena. Methods . In the process of studying the phenomenon and, above all, the problems of scientific theoretical modeling of corruption risks, epistemological possibilities of systemic, structural-functional, comparative-legal methods of cognition of social and political-legal phenomena, analytical grounds of discursive, interpretive, predictive and content analysis are used. Results . The importance of the research is substantiated, and the totality of those problems that relate to further improvement of the ideationaltheoretical and methodological foundations of the scientific study of corruption phenomena and processes is considered. Based on the principles of the methodology of scientific knowledge, systemic consideration of interpretations introduced by regulatory legal acts of Ukraine and publications of Ukrainian scientists on the risks of corruption and taking into account the specifics of their conceptual interpretations and classifications, the advantages and disadvantages of the points of view common in the modern Ukrainian corruption discourse on the conditions and mechanisms of corruption risk formation, respectively, their definitions, are revealed. The necessity of correcting the general theoretical content of the notion of "corruption risk" with the aim of its specification and normative unification with the terminology and requirements of the current legislation and regulatory documents of anti-corruption bodies (first of all, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention) has been substantiated. Conclusions . The imperfection of modern theoretical ideas about the essence of the phenomenon of corruption risks has been analyzed and characterized, a scientific comparison has been made, and the peculiarities of their interpretation and conceptual and terminological fixation have been revealed, firstly, in the current anti-corruption Ukrainian legislation and normative methodological documents, and secondly, in Ukrainian and foreign volumes on corruption, as a result of which a more universal and optimal for the modern theoretical model and practical procedures (assessment methods) definition of the notion of "corruption risk" has been formulated.