Corruption and the Web of Accountability Institutions: The Brazilian Case

The role of democracy as a check on corruption centers on its ability to foster a network of governmental accountability mechanisms. This paper is an exploratory study on the performance of the web of accountability institutions in Brazil. We seek to understand how this web act in order to control the corruption cases involving federal resources. The origin of the data is the reports made by a federal auditing agency. The central point of the research is to map the trajectory of the corruption cases found by this agency in the web of accountability institutions: whether these institutions perform joint actions to control and punish corruption. The paper will be able to point out the bureaucratic and legal processes involved in fighting corruption, allowing us to delineate the vulnerable points of this web. We sustain corruption and the fail in the accountability processes as threats to more inclusive democracies.