Braz. political sci. rev.2024;19(1):e0007.
Taking the Politics of Corruption and Anti-Corruption Seriously*
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3821202500010007
A recent wave of publications in the field of corruption studies cannot help but take the politics that is deeply embedded into the topic seriously. After the 1990s and 2000s witnessed the rise of a largely economics-inspired anti-corruption industry that influenced from public policy to academic research, now, as many of the remedies of that industry failed to work as imagined, it is about time to take stock. Lucio Picci’s (2024) ‘Rethinking Corruption’ is an essential contribution to this growing ‘post-consensual’ view of corruption that adds to recent volumes that such authors as , , and , to mention a few, published. In addition to contributing to this vivid contemporary debate, this is possibly one of the most insightful and honest books on the topic to come out in years. It addresses not only problems in many of our current approaches to corruption and anti-corruption, but also lays groundwork for new research and, hopefully, better informed policy prescriptions.
The book has several merits. It is based on years of the author’s own research experience as a trained economist who has worked precisely within the confines of the once prevailing view on corruption. As such, it provides a knowledgeable ‘insider view’ from the field, reflecting on several assumptions, concepts, metrics and hence conclusions widely and oftentimes uncritically shared across the corruption scholarship and the anti-corruption industry. The first part of the book presents a precious discussion about several shortcomings of this largely economics-inspired literature, which, on the one hand, conceives corruption as a discrete choice that rational self-interested individuals make and designs incentives to tackle it (e.g., ; ), while, on the other, advances and bases its analyses on country-year indicators of corruption levels that such organizations as Transparency International and the World Bank (e.g. ; ) produce. Picci’s analysis (2024) showcases several limits of these approaches, including how this narrow conception of corruption fails to capture elements that should be central to it (e.g., inequality, power relations); how the emphasis on generic country-year indicators has led to relatively little knowledge about the actual processes of corruption on the ground; how the same indicators are poor at identifying many of the things that reformers care most, such as changes in the incidence of corruption over time and critical historical junctures; how the solutions advanced by most industry are often too simplistic to such a complex and variegated problem; and so on.
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