This chapter discusses corruption in Brazil. I provide a comprehensive overview of relevant facts, with a focus on the economy and the distribution of economic resources. This understanding will be crucial in examining the role of corruption in the political landscape of Brazilian society, which is marked by pronounced inequality. Brazil shares similarities and differences with Russia. In both countries, there is a close, often corrupt relationship between political power and state-controlled enterprises. In contrast to Brazil, the anti-corruption movement in Russia has not only failed to seriously challenge the government, but also has been confronted by brutal repression. Unlike in Russia, Brazil’s judiciary has been highly proactive. Moreover, the Brazilian government participated actively to the anti-corruption global regime, while Russia mostly pays lip service to it.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. A focus on the social construction of corruption leads to the two main conclusions. First, corruption is a tool of government, because it offers reasons for elites to remain cohesive. These incentives may be in the form of both benefits and punishments. To the first type belong the enticements of corruption, and they are reinforced whenever the ruler has the possibility to assign at will the label “corrupt” and the ensuing punishments. This helps rulers solve a problem of control, which is a prerequisite for political order and a vital necessity of any political system. However, corruption as a tool of government has fundamental flaws. The second broad conclusion is that anti-corruption is a tool of politics, because it can be used to pursue a political agenda. Additionally, corruption is a tool of politics which is available more widely, because it is a powerful “valence issue,” that is, one of those issues on which most people agree, either negatively (as for corruption) or positively (as it would be, e.g., for “competence”). However, as a tool of politics anti-corruption has many shortcomings.

Anti-corruption efforts struggle against the perverse aptness of corruption in satisfying that prerequisite of government which is control. Anti-corruption efforts also fall victim to the function it serves as a tool of politics. From this perspective, this chapter derives a pessimistic view on the prospects of anti-corruption efforts that are narrowly defined, on which I present some concluding considerations. They vouch for a broader approach to the question of corruption, and they touch upon the idea of modernity and one of its key ingredients: the possibility of human agency.

Separation of powers or, more exactly, the rule of law, due process or, in Europe, the right to a fair trial influence the institutional setting of antitrust or regulatory authorities and law enforcement. An increased role given to specific regulation or antitrust in order to tackle some fundamental issues posed by the concentration of economic-political power does not go without independent and impartial decision-making from an institutional and procedural, a personal or a financial and lobbying perspective.

Peru’s Lava Jato stretched its tentacles widely and ravaged the political establishment. Grand corruption cases present a series of challenges related to how to secure evidence in information-poor and politically hostile environments. Overcoming these challenges without jeopardizing the integrity of the inquiry is no small feat. The tools that prosecutors rely on generate controversy, as well as tensions between effectiveness and due process that are difficult to resolve. Success therefore calls for clever and skillful prosecutors. The analysis digs deep into the dynamics of Peru’s Lava Jato to discuss the nature of these challenges and how prosecutors dealt with them. Contingent choices often determined whether enough evidence came to light, thus widening the window for ambitious investigative efforts. The chapter further looks at the backlash that ensued, how this conditioned prosecutorial efforts, and why investigators were able to mitigate its impact. One interesting feature of Peru’s Lava Jato is that prosecutors not only had to deal with an obstructionist political class, but also with networks of judicial clientelism commanded by senior officials. The chapter traces how rank-and-file prosecutors negotiated such bureaucratic pathologies to protect the inquiry, and discusses the likely impact of these struggles on the future of the case.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), originally intended to cover 12 Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam), was arguably the largest and most economically significant regional trade agreement (RTA) ever concluded. Together, the original TPP signatories accounted for about 26% of world trade and 36% of world GDP. In early 2017, the United States withdrew from the TPP on the direction of the then-newly elected US President, Donald J. Trump, casting the agreement’s future into uncertainty.

We may not always want citizens to care so much about retributive justice since these concerns pave the way for populist, authoritarian, and illiberal trajectories. But instead of indulging in the comfortable assumption that democracy naturally results in effective governance, we need to recognize and understand when and why these concerns come to the fore so that we can understand how best to work toward the political outcomes that we deem normatively desirable. This chapter discusses recent democratic backsliding, the dangers of anti-corruption politics, and what liberal democrats can learn from authoritarians through the lens of retributive justice.

Chapter 2 explicates the retributive justice theory of citizen engagement. This theory starts from the premise that people prefer government authorities who govern according to principles that have a moral basis, that we want more from government than simply deferring to elites with more power and resources. I argue that one fundamental expectation is for government authorities to provide retributive justice, or the use of punishment to uphold what is fair and right. Besides deterring future malfeasance, such punishment upholds the fundamental values of the political community and enables higher-level officials to show citizens they are moral leaders. Thus, when authoritarian politicians – both in robustly authoritarian regimes and in electoral democracies moving toward greater authoritarianism – successfully show citizens they are committed to retributive justice, they may enjoy a high level of public support and legitimacy and high levels of citizen engagement and voluntary compliance.

Under what circumstances do ordinary people prefer to elect illiberal leaders they know will violate individual rights? Why do people sometimes view authoritarian leaders as fair, just, and morally upstanding? This book aims to demonstrate that retributive justice concerns matter for how citizens judge government and how they make decisions about when to engage and comply with government authorities. While economic performance, public goods provision, democratic institutions, and redistribution matter as well, this book argues that retributive justice matters as much and sometimes more than these other criteria. A retributive justice model of citizen engagement has important implications for understanding the conditions under which we might expect populism to increase, interventions promoting citizen participation and government accountability to fail, and state building to succeed. Bridging behavioral and institutional approaches, this book’s retributive justice theory of citizen engagement accounts for authoritarian resilience as well as democratic fragility within a new, unified framework.

The next question is whether these findings apply to the real world. Do we see similar patterns between real-world institutions for top-down discipline and citizen evaluations of their actual officials? Does retributive justice affect behavioral outcomes? And are retributive justice concerns salient in countries other than China? Chapter 5 assesses the external validity of the causal relationships presented in Chapter 4 in several ways. It draws on original surveys conducted both before and after the launch of the current anti-corruption campaign in China to examine whether citizens in localities with stronger top-down institutions for bureaucratic discipline have more positive evaluations of local authorities, higher levels of participation, and higher willingness to engage in voluntary compliance. The chapter then expands the investigation beyond rural China to discuss findings showing that retributive justice concerns help account for voluntary compliance behaviors among urban Chinese as well as in countries beyond China.

Ling Li’s chapter focuses on how the Party operates in the governance space in China, using the evolution of the disciplinary regime of the Chinese Communist Party to demonstrate what she sees as the defining feature of China’s single-party state: two separate seats of power and sources of legitimation which enable the Party to use a variety of ways to impose authoritarian control over state affairs. Her analysis of the particular organisational features of China’s Party-state draws on a description of the evolution of this dualism and on the historical development of anti-corruption institutions as an exemplar of how the Party governs through supervision and discipline in China. She connects this discussion with the contemporary development of the National Supervision Commission. In this way, the chapter presents an historical evolution that can explain the establishment of the Commission, which represents the apex of Party-state disciplinary and supervisory ambitions in China today.

Because of the economic power of incumbent firms and the political power of multiple veto players, changes to the developmental state were usually incremental.This contributed to the protagonism of the civil service as a change agent. Drawing on three case studies, the chapter illustrates how epistemic communities within the bureaucracy guided a variety of innovations across unconnected policy arenas: fiscal, health, and anti-corruption. Although policy innovation by the bureaucracy was incremental, slow, and often restricted to particular “islands of excellence” within the archipelago of state agencies, it was nonetheless essential to the most important accomplishments of the past generation. Civil service incrementalism, however, may have made change away from the overarching systemic equilibrium of the developmental state less likely, by exacerbating the fiscal quandary, sustaining the coalitional presidential system, and suppressing demands for more radical reform.

The conclusions of this book presented in Chapter 8 include a criticism of EU-driven anti-corruption measures to date and a summary of choices that the EU has for the future. Besides the too-great ambition of the task and the absence of domestic agency in favor of change, the study finds several causes internal to the EU that could be remedied. Perhaps the most important is the excessive formality in the EU’s bureaucratic approach to anti-corruption, and its absence of a realistic theory of change. On the contrary, extensive European interventions seem actually to disincentivize a more political, domestically driven approach to governance transformation as in the likes of Estonia and Georgia, two reform champions praised in this book. Europe’s choices should be modeled on the different contexts of the countries, primarily on the rule of law situation, and its instruments should be reformed by investing in what seems to work and cutting what does not.

Europeanization is a specific type of external intervention in the governance of a nation, and Chapter 4 deciphers the many meanings of “Europeanization,” applied in particular to the “modernization” of government and promotion of good governance. Specific theories of change related to Europeanization are then empirically checked against evidence from over 120 countries where EU offers aid, producing little evidence of any impact of EU aid on governance improvement.