Nothing is more current than Senator Jaques Wagner’s statement when commenting on the president’s re-election strategy in 2014: “We are campaigning and we are trying to make a platform about an issue rejected by the population, which is… Nobody wins an election by saying ‘I’m honest’. Especially because nobody believes it.”
Wagner was wrong in his diagnosis that this topic was “rejected by the population”, but he was right when he pointed to the issue of the credibility of statements about honesty. In the current situation, one’s perception means that no one believes that politicians are honest. May Supreme Court ministers be honest. Or that directors of or are honest.
When corruption is rampant, its effects on incentives are systemic. As I already analyzed in the column, . At first glance, it may suggest that it gives rise to widespread civic cynicism, and that citizens lose the capacity to be indignant. The average effect for voters could be . But corruption is not a homogeneous category.
The accumulated evidence in political science shows exactly the opposite: people distinguish between types of corruption. Marco Klasjna, Noam Lupu and Joshua Tucker in experimental comparative work in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, as part of Lapop (Latin American Public Opinion Project), concluded that information about the extent of corruption does not affect the punishment of .
This is consistent with the strong rejection of corruption in the abstract, but little effective impact in concrete situations (). Cases of personal enrichment generate strong moral disapproval and tend to result in electoral punishment. Forms of corruption associated with the provision of public goods — works, social programs, transfers — are judged ambiguously. In these cases, people operate with trade-offs: they weigh corruption against performance, policy delivery, party alignment and identity loyalty. The patterns “steal but do” or “steal but distribute” are known, which have increasingly been replaced by “steal but belong to my tribe”.
In the case of the Supreme Court scandal, it is the defense of democracy that has been mobilized. But this has had clearly diminishing returns. Here the critical aspect is the reversal of expectations: illicit acts committed where least suspected. But the moral judgment of those involved in corruption in the Master case and the INSS has no trade-off involved and, therefore, assumes high voltage. And they contrast with the corruption exposed in many cases of budget amendments, where the effects are mitigated by the provision of public goods.
The Supreme Court’s reaction to the indictment of its members fuels the spiral of indignation and the public feeling of a “sea of mud”. The hyperbolic report presented by the rapporteur is a reflection of the brutal interference of the court itself, the government and the parliamentary base in their work. The report was accused of being “electoral” — “of being a soapbox” (Wagner) — precisely because it will focus on high-voltage ballot boxes. What I talked about in the column could backfire.
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