This article identifies four frames of corruption in the discourse of three leaders of Operation Lava Jato, also known in English as Operation Car Wash, a large-scale Brazilian anticorruption operation (2014–2021). These frames are inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease. The frames were identified by analyzing a wide set of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by two prosecutors and one judge whose work has revealed scandals involving the state oil company Petrobras. The operation had a major impact on politics and the economy and left a controversial legacy. We noticed a contradiction between one frame invoking judicial activism (inequality) and three frames focusing on specific techniques that appeal to a more conventional view on the judiciary’s role (hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease). Furthermore, even when scholars were still largely positive about the operation, the discourse showed signs of judicial activism. This analysis contributes to the debate on Lava Jato and judicial activism by focusing on discourse rather than action.

Traditionally, corruption is seen as a rational pursuit of profit, focusing on personal gain. However, this view overlooks other influences. This paper focuses on the behavioral aspects of corruption, providing a deeper understanding of its complexities, and addressing the factors overlooked by conventional approaches. Reviewing some of the literature, we highlight how researchers have approached corruption from the perspective of behavioral sciences. Additionally, we examine how the emerging discipline of Behavioral Public Policy (BPP) employs innovative methods to reduce corrupt practices, offering new strategies that transcend traditional perspectives. Our paper innovates by demonstrating how corruption can be reduced by substituting traditional regulations with nonregulatory tools like nudges and sludge audits, or by leveraging digital choice architectures to minimize human-to-human interactions, known corruption enablers. By reducing regulations and administrative red tape, and introducing digital frameworks, these tools simplify processes minimizing opportunities for corrupt behavior. In this paper, we aim to infuse corruption research with a behavioral twist, a digital approach, and a deregulatory perspective, offering policymakers an alternative path to foster transparency, accountability and ethical governance. While this approach will not completely eradicate corruption, it strives to show how BPP can reduce its occurrences.

While much of the scholarship on gender and corruption suggests that women in political office are, or are perceived to be, less corrupt than men, in just the past few years corruption accusations against Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and South Korea's Park Geun-hye have made headlines and led to their impeachment. In this article, we argue women heads of government are actually more likely to be charged with corruption due to pervasive beliefs that women, by their very presence, corrupt public office. Using cross-national data, we first demonstrate that women executives are significantly more likely to be formally accused of corruption than their male counterparts. We then present case studies of Brazilian President Rousseff and Turkish Prime Minister Çiller to demonstrate the powerful role of gendered discourse in motivating suspicion and inflaming elite and public sentiment and thereby driving corruption charges. These findings make a substantial contribution to the literature on gender, leadership and the politics of corruption.

In the two decades since the end of Suharto regime in Indonesia, two apparently distinct public industries have emerged in tandem: gendered forms of religious style, glossed as modest fashion, and legal efforts to hold citizens accountable for theft, glossed as corruption. Many of the most high-profile anti-corruption cases in the past decade have brought these two fields into semiotic interaction, as female defendants increasingly deploy forms of facial cover associated with extreme religious piety to signal humility and shame when appearing in court, in the process complicating the relationship between religious semiotics and criminality. Analyzing how and why these two genres of political communication have intersected in the past decade, and to what effects, requires situating these shifts in the context of dense aesthetic archives in which the spectacularity inherent to fashion resonates with the unique impulses of a post-authoritarian political landscape in which uncovering secrets is especially alluring. I argue that the hermeneutic impulses motivating popular fascination with criminal style, often circulated via social media, open new analyses of the ethical relationship between beauty and justice. Building on the scholarship on transparency and on the human face, I argue that putting gendered religious style at the center of the analytical frame—from religious self-fashioning to court appearances, and as forms of political protest—reveals the ethical impulses behind seeing and being seen, and the faciality of scandal.

This article investigates the effect of priming the existence of corrupt connections to the bureaucracy and of trusted references on the demand for intermediary services. We performed an experimental survey with undergraduate students in Caracas, Venezuela. Participants are presented with a hypothetical situation in which they need to obtain the apostille of their professional degrees in order to migrate and are considering whether to hire an intermediary (“gestor”) or not. The survey randomly reveals the existence of an illicit connection between the gestor and the bureaucracy and whether a trusted individual referred the intermediary. Our findings are not consistent with the “market maker” hypothesis that revealing the existence of illicit connections increases demand. Consistent with the view that trust is a key element in inherently opaque transactions, we find that the demand for intermediaries is price inelastic when gestores are referred by trusted individuals.

While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade-off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians’ competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters’ priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens’ support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a suboptimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public’s unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.

What candidates do voters perceive as best to combat corruption? While recent studies suggest that parties recruit women in order to restore legitimacy, we know less about whether voters believe that women candidates are better equipped than male candidates to fight corruption. This study suggests that women mayors are seen as more likely to fight corruption, yet that the credibility of both male and female politicians increases if they are ascribed traits traditionally seen as ‘female,’ including being risk averse or specializing in the provision of welfare services. Leveraging the diverse levels of socio-economic development, corruption, and gender equality across 25 EU member countries, our unique conjoint experiment shows support for these claims. Both women and male candidates benefit from being described as risk averse and prioritizing social welfare issues, while outsider status has no effect. Male candidates, however, have a consistent disadvantage, particularly among women voters. Moreover, the effects of candidate gender are strongest in areas of Europe with the highest levels of political gender equality.

Anticorruption audits may deter corruption and signal to citizens that institutions are proactively combating it. However, by detecting and reporting corruption, audits might also unintentionally erode trust in institutions. Therefore, the impact of audits potentially hinges on whether they uncover corruption. Audit institutions, not implicated in the corruption they uncover, might be less likely to experience a decline in trust compared to auditee institutions. This study uses survey and administrative data from Brazil, leveraging a federal anti-corruption program that randomly selects municipalities for auditing. Results do not support the claim that audits boost institutional trust. Individuals in audited municipalities show no different levels of trust in local government or the audit institution than those in non-audited municipalities, and the coefficients may even indicate a negative effect. Additionally, audit institutions may not be better insulated from the corrosive effects of uncovering corruption than the institutions they audit.

Prior studies in the United States argue that the discretionary decisions of federal prosecutors regarding which issues to prioritize are shaped by the politicians who appoint them, while studies on state prosecutors emphasize the role of press coverage and public opinion. However, these studies leave untheorized whether prosecutors’ discretionary decisions are also affected by how their peers frame issues within and beyond prosecution offices. Building on the scholarship of collective action frames, this study develops a framework to explain how prosecutors’ framing work affects their colleagues’ decisions about which issues to focus on. I draw on the case of Brazil, where federal prosecutors focused on crime-fighting and human rights, but in the mid-2010s switched focus to corruption following a large-scale investigation called Lava Jato. I compare Lava Jato with two similarly large investigations that failed to transform corruption into the dominant issue within the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Drawing on 131 original interviews, I show how federal prosecutors’ framing work can persuade their colleagues to focus on the same issue through two stages: (1) conceptualization of versatile frames that speak to problems a variety of issues prosecutors care about and (2) diffusion of frames through professional meetings – providing roadmaps for how other prosecutors can implement the new frame – and to the press, increasing public attention.

This paper provides a detailed exploration of the sale of offices in China and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In France, the sale of offices became deeply integrated into the officialdom, effectively serving as a formal institution. It was a part of the financial framework and contributed to the operation of the bureaucracy. However, this practice led to public dissatisfaction due to concerns about the fairness of the judicial system. Conversely, in China, the sale of offices was less formalized and more directly associated with corruption due to the close connection with informal income and the challenge to the formal system of imperial civil examinations. It was considered an ad hoc, informal, and pragmatic solution to financial emergencies. The sale of offices, in a different context, was seen as having both positive and negative aspects, with its impact varying, depending on the specific function it served.

This paper examines the potential role of network analysis in understanding the powerful elites that pose a significant threat to peace and state-building within post-conflict contexts. This paper makes a threefold contribution. First, it identifies a caveat in the scholarship surrounding international interventions, shedding light on shortcomings in their design and implementation strategies, and elucidating the influence these elites wield in the political and economic realms. Next, it delineates the essentials of the network analysis approach, addressing the information and data requirements and limitations inherent in its application in conflict environments. Finally, the paper provides valuable insights gleaned from the international operation in Guatemala known as the International Commission for Impunity in Guatemala, which specifically targeted illicit networks. The argument asserts that network analysis functions as a dual-purpose tool—serving as both a descriptive instrument to reveal, identify, and address the root causes of conflict and a predictive tool to enhance peace agreement implementation and improve decision-making. Simultaneously, it underscores the challenge of data analysis and translating network interventions into tangible real-life consequences for long-lasting results.

This article uses the case study of Slovakia and its lackluster experience with a judge-dominated judicial council to demonstrate that formal institutions have only limited impact on the ideational level. We show that the transformation of the Slovak post-communist judiciary relied on the presumption that judges‘ interests are automatically complementary to principles of the rule of law. Therefore, the majority of implemented reforms insulated the judiciary from the political branches of power, but allowed strong hierarchical relationships inside the courts to exist. In contrast to international expectations, judicial authorities used judicial empowerment to create or strengthen competing informal practices, which helped them to maximize their power. We argue that the lack of internalization of judicial independence might explain why institutional self-governance reforms failed to trigger changes in the professional role conception of judges in regimes riddled with deeply embedded informal institutions. In order to tackle this problem, we propose that future research on the relationship between institutional safeguards and decisional judicial independence should focus on the process through which actors internalize new institutional incentives.