Anti-Corruption Agencies (ACAs) and Whistleblowing: Complementary or Substitutive?

National anti-corruption regimes vary in their institutional designs. This paper asks why institutional choices vary and how do these choices reflect on the politics of corruption in different polities. The logic beyond the institutional choices stands at the center of this paper. We apply a comparative method, to better understand different national varieties of the use of whistleblowers and agencies in anticorruption regimes. The findings support the argument that liberal democracies tend to use whistleblowers rather than agencies, while illiberal democracies tend to use agencies. We examine three different explanations for the politics of institutional choice and suggest that while the severity of the corruption problem might push for agencification, the main reason for the liberal preferences towards the whistleblowing mechanism is the emphasize on personal integrity on the one hand and the responsibilization duties that emerge from this emphasis.