Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Foreign agencies have been more actively sharing the resource burden of global investigations. As a recently revealed case, Brazilian firms paid a record-setting penalty of over $3.5 billion to resolve a bribery case involving American, Brazilian and other authorities. While it is difficult to deny the success of anti-corruption efforts represented by national and global corruption investigations, it is at the same time easy to realize that when such investigations involve significant politicians, several interest groups engage in an advocacy work consisting on politicizing a technical and complex issue that simultaneously encompasses law, policy, and management, with the huge additional challenge of involving not only the Executive, but also the Judiciary and Legislative Branches. To what extent this problem is restricted to emerging democracies/economies, or does it also affect the advanced ones? More specifically, what is the role of mainstream/social media, fake news, prosecutors, and judges in such politicization of corruption investigations, and how all these players can influence the electorate in contexts of institutional crises and change political landscapes? This paper addresses these issues in selected countries/cases (e.g. Car Wash (“Lava Jato”, Brazil since 2014) and Clean Hands (“Mani Pulite”), Italy 1990s) in a comparative exercise building on evidence able to subsidize solid policy and legal decisions that could prevent politicization from affecting the corruption investigations themselves, and at least mitigate the effects of such politicization over other fundamental (democratic) institutions. The first draft of this paper will be presented at the ASPA 2019 Annual Conference, March 8-12.