A matter of personal choice? Anti-corruption policies in the UK and Mexico

Corruption generates injustices and is harmful to society at large, although the poor are normally disproportionally affected. Anti-corruption policies, strategies and education can therefore be highly beneficial, but must ensure that representations and explanations of the problem contribute to a wider understanding of its causal mechanisms; of the political and institutional conditions that lead to and sustain corrupt practices. Policy interventions to date have typically been designed around rational-choice theory, seeking to de-incentivise corruption by increasing controls and sanctions, which in turn are communicated to through various ‘public education’ campaigns. In this paper we analyse two anti-corruption educational initiatives from two very different contexts, the anti-corruption toolkit Say No from the Institute of Business Ethics in the UK, and The book of anti-corruption (El libro anticorrupción, 2917) commissioned by the Mexican government and distributed freely to citizens from lower socio-economic backgrounds. These two initiatives exemplify an approach that is used in other national contexts, as well. Using a multimodal Critical Policy Discourse Analysis approach (Mulderrig et al., 2019), we ask how the problem is framed and at whom it is targeted. The Say No app-based toolkit is designed to distil the UK 2010 Anti-bribery Act for practical use in the workplace. It effectively removes the dilemma of choice by offering ‘Yes/No’ answers to various decision-making scenarios, like offering and receiving gifts. By contrast, the Book of anti-corruption uses a simplistic narrative in comic form to encourage ‘ordinary’ people to recognise and reject ‘everyday’ practices of corruption, by highlighting the punitive consequences. Despite their differences, we show that in both strategies, corruption is framed and thus systematically misrepresented as the lack of ethical conduct and values of individuals. Consequently, attention is diverted away from structures that enable and motivate agents to engage in illicit practices, as well as from the absence of structures that would inhibit such actions. This reduces a highly and systemic complex phenomenon to individual volition, personal moral failure, and in the worst-case scenario, habitual practices that are essential to particular groups. Such misrepresentations ultimately undermine anti-corruption efforts and, in certain cases, do nothing to challenge the structures of social injustice which sustain ‘everyday’ corruption.