A Content Analysis approach on Corruption in bilateral and multilateral agreements: The case of Brazil (1985- 2020)

Brazilian politics has been undergoing a phase where the anti-corruption agenda faces ever-growing importance in the electoral debates. Besides, the Car-Wash Operation, which started in 2014, has originated requests of both passive and active international cooperation with many countries. This paper seeks to analyse the international treatment of corruption by the Brazilian government through its agreements and declarations. To do this, we have collected 133 agreements from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ archive, the Concordia, from 1985 to 2020. To gather these documents, we used as criteria their content, which should have at least one mention of corruption, money laundering and/or financing of terrorism. This paper uses Content Analysis and Textual Mining Techniques to explore all the data collected. In doing so, we also propose to investigate if there are major differences between bilateral and multilateral documents, which we expect will bring a new standpoint to the study agenda on anti-corruption. Based on the literature, we expect to find a softer discursive connotation of corruption in those declarations that have three or more parties.