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The discursive use of the concept of ‘corruption’ in parliamentary debates during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1935–74)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2015

Luís De Sousa  and
Marcelo Moriconi
Luís De Sousa*
Affiliation:
Unidade de Investigação em Governança, Competitividade e Políticas Públicas (GOVCOPP), University of Aveiro (UA), Aveiro, Portugal
Marcelo Moriconi
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigações e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-IUL), Lisbon Unversity Institute (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal
*
*E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Corruption is deviant behaviour from legal and social norms, observable in both dictatorships and democracies, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind. Studying corruption in dictatorships is particularly challenging due to the fact that freedom of expression is censored and there is little (if any) reliable information about the enforcement of legal provisions. This article provides a contribution to the growing literature on the role of legislatures in dictatorships by focusing on parliamentary debates on corruption as a discourse control mechanism. The case of the Portuguese legislature during the Estado Novo is paradigmatic in that regard. The National Assembly, as it will be demonstrated in this article, was able to shift the debate on corruption from the legal to the moral dimension and, thus, deprive citizens, and in particular the opposition, of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable for their misconduct.

Keywords

corruptionauthoritarianismlegislaturesparliamentary debatesmoralityEstado Novo
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 159 - 181
Copyright
© Societá Italiana di Scienza Politica 2015 

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