Publications

This chapter explores the relation between social mobilization and anti-corruption in Latin America. First, it reconstructs the emergence and transnational diffusion of a strong anti-corruption and transparency consensus during the 1990s in the region. Then it analyzes the way in which corruption as a social problem was progressively incorporated into the frame of social mobilization as a significant element of criticism and confrontation with party politics. Finally, through a comparative analysis of recent large-scale anti-government demonstrations in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and Peru, the chapter shows that although perceptions of corruption do not directly translate into an anti-corruption movement, the anti-corruption rhetoric has become a strategic framing for the spread of anti-government demonstrations in the region allowing: (a) a challenge to presidential figures and relevant leaders, (b) a critique of institutional politics in moral terms, and, (c) the sedimentation of specific repertoires linking anti-corruption demands to large-scale contention.

In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association are limited. Analyses of these new data suggest that: (1) Russian bribe-givers are embedded in outward-oriented and mobilizable personal networks, supportive of civic connectivity; and (2) Russian bribe-givers are significantly more likely than law-abiding citizens to mobilize others when pushing back against the state. Counterintuitively, then, in non-democracies, corruption in the public sector sustains the kind of social networks that underlie civic culture.

This brief article intends to demonstrate some of the problems with the main theories on corruption and introduce the reader to the field of Anthropology of Corruption, a type of research that tries to understand one of the most pressing issues nowadays through a non-binary point of view, but trying to understand the root of corruption, and its multifaceted characteristic, especially through its cultural aspect; and why it is, contemporarily, the most effective political-economic discourse – most at the times used in a populistic fashion, at the expense of democratic institutions. Therefore, we will briefly analyze the three main theoretical strands on corruption and point at some of its faults; then indicate to the reader what are the main goals Anthropology of Corruption, and what questions it seeks to answer; and, finally, the political impact that corruption discourses have on society, and its perils when mobilized by populistic discourses.

Law-abiding firms often attempt to conceal their corporate political activity (CPA), yet the concealment of CPA has not been matched by our understanding of the phenomenon. We develop a theoretical framework consisting of three components to analyze firms’ CPA concealment strategies. First, we provide a detailed conceptual background on CPA concealment, including what CPA concealment is and how it can occur. Second, we develop an in-depth analysis of the key benefits and costs of concealing CPA for firms. Finally, we integrate this analysis with positive political theory to place our firm-level calculus in the context of policymaking by identifying the public policymakers whom firms are most likely to influence via CPA concealment. Based on this framework, we generate additional empirically testable propositions on how CPA concealment changes with factors at the country, institution, issue, and firm levels. This study is the first to generate systematic theory on firms’ CPA concealment strategies. Moreover, this research context highlights the particular importance of theory for investigating consequential phenomena that yield scarce data; it is theory which guides data discovery ex ante, helps assess bias ex post, and uncovers key insights that empirical analysis alone cannot generate.

We know a lot about the new wave of autocrats and how they operate but much less about why so many people, particularly in the developing world, are cheering them on. Case-in-point: How do we make sense of widespread popular support for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s strongman rule? Scholars generally cite frustration with a democracy widely regarded as elite-dominated and endemically corrupt, but this account is underspecified. Filipinos have been frustrated with liberal democracy for a long time and Duterte is not the first law-and-order candidate to seek the presidency. I will argue that we need to situate Duterte’s election and enduring appeal in the conversation about democracy as it has unfolded on the ground. Specifically, (1) repeated failures to reform democracy have resulted in (2) conditional support for democracy and increasing openness to certain authoritarian forms of government. (3) These attitudes manifest on the ground as calls for “disciplining” democracy. (4) Rodrigo Duterte is seen as a “strong leader” and the answer to such calls, hence his enormous popularity. I will provide evidence for each of these claims and make the case for grounding the illiberal turn in people’s experience of democracy.

The case study provides participants a rich narrative about corruption-related ethical dilemmas in a large public organization operating within a multifaceted social, economic and legal environment. Participants are put in the position of a fictive character, Susanne Boyle, Director of the Office of Institutional Compliance, Ethics, and Equity, who must consider immediate action to manage three corruption-related issues but also consider how policies should be changed in order to avoid similar problems in the future. The case study intends to demonstrate the challenges with ethical decision-making within complex social systems and not purely rational bureaucratic arrangements. Similar to many real-life organizational situations, Susanne Boyle is personally and emotionally involved and must navigate between clashing moralities, norms and values related to her informal social network, as well as her official duties and responsibilities.

This research lays out the debates and contradictory findings regarding the impacts of corruption on forest loss in a cross-national context, specifically in low- and middle-income nations. After, I describe how these inconsistent findings may be due to difficulties in untangling the complexities of corruption definitionally and then operationalizing it in a cross-national context. Then, I review the advances in corruption data collection and measurement. Finally, I discuss how these developments in data collection and operationalization have led to an expansion of research on corruption to other aspects of governance, bringing forward several avenues for future research, but also potentially conflating definitions of corruption with governance. Overall, I aim to capture how scholars are studying corruption and forest loss from a cross-national context and what their findings tell us.

Scholars contend that weak institutions as manifest in corruption and bad governance are driving people towards illiberal forms of democracy. This explanation is underspecified. It does not make clear why people are turning towards authoritarian rule instead of working to strengthen democratic institutions. It cannot explain why we are seeing, specifically, a turn to the politics of discipline in countries like the Philippines. We need a better grasp of how weak institutions are experienced and how this experience shapes people’s attitudes towards democracy. Drawing upon several years of ethnographic research, I depict the experience of democracy of the upper and middle class in Metro Manila. For informants, the problem of democracy is not that institutions are weak but that valued institutions are actively contradicted by disvalued ones. They describe an experience of disorder, identifying four major sources: corruption, rule-bending, clientelism, and informal settlement. A view of democracy as disorder prompts calls for “disciplining” it. These findings lead us to reframe the issue. Whereas a weak institutions’ framework emphasizes the gap between valued rules and regressive norms, I emphasize their contradiction as shaping perceptions of disorder. Contradiction is experienced as a moral dilemma, a conflict between how things are done and how they should be done. This experience is informed by a normative sensibility rooted in upper- and middle-class position. The framework provides a better account of democratic backsliding: socially embedded, broader in scope, and closer to experience.

In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from corruption as a “problem” to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy.

This paper shows how the Puerto Rican government has used punitive governance to deal with three important reactions to the multilayered crisis affecting Puerto Rico since 2006: socioenvironmental mobilizations; anti-austerity mobilizations; and anticorruption mobilizations. The paper proposes a threefold analysis. Firstly, it provides a brief overview of the Puerto Rican economic and financial crisis, the neoliberal solutions to the crisis, and its consequences. Secondly, the paper expands on the intertwined / intertwining relationship between punitive governance, colonialism, and criminal law. Thirdly, the paper analyzes the process of criminalization of the socioenvironmental, anti-austerity, and anticorruption mobilizations resisting colonial abandonment. Two strategies will be discussed: (1) the uses of criminal law to limit freedom of speech and protests and (2) repression and the systemic deployment of state violence against protestors. The state’s violent reactions to sociopolitical mobilizations are part of a long history of criminalizing and repressive practices that must e understood against the backdrop of US colonial history in Puerto Rico.

The case study provides participants a rich narrative about corruption-related ethical dilemmas in a large public organization operating within a multifaceted social, economic and legal environment. Participants are put in the position of a fictive character, Susanne Boyle, Director of the Office of Institutional Compliance, Ethics, and Equity, who must consider immediate action to manage three corruption-related issues but also consider how policies should be changed in order to avoid similar problems in the future. The case study intends to demonstrate the challenges with ethical decision-making within complex social systems and not purely rational bur- eaucratic arrangements. Similar to many real-life organizational situations, Susanne Boyle is personally and emotionally involved and must navigate between clashing moralities, norms and values related to her informal social network, as well as her official duties and responsibilities.

This article develops a relational explanation for judicial corruption, namely, a spatial theory of institutional proximity, to complement existing behavioral and institutional approaches. Institutional proximity refers to the spatial proximity between adjacent political or social institutions, including courts. This proximity can be a result of political or administrative regulations, workplace interactions, or the mobility of individual actors between them. Linking ecologies and space travelers are two key spatial mechanisms through which institutional proximity enables judicial corruption. They pave the pathways of judicial corruption, that is, how corrupt transactions and related social interactions are facilitated by and communicated through institutions adjacent to the court. The theory is operationalized in the context of Chinese courts and the various pathways of judicial corruption are exemplified through a number of publicly reported cases in China.