Corruption in the perception of Brazilian society: persistence and resilience

Abstract

Political corruption is one of the most severe and complex problems facing new and old democracies. Fundamentally, it involves the abuse of public power for any kind of private benefit, including advantages to governing parties over their opposition. It thus defeats the principle of political equality inherent in democracy, as its protagonists can obtain or maintain power and political benefits disproportionate to what they would achieve through legitimate and forms of political competition. At the same time, it distorts the republican dimension of democracy because it makes public policies result, not from debate and public dispute between different projects, but from behind-the-scenes agreements that favor spurious interests. Despite the efficiency of classical methodological instruments such as opinion polls with structured questionnaires and qualitative research with focus groups, it is still possible to identify biases in the quality of the information collected on corruption. This article aims to address this issue by introducing two survey experiments, one conducted in 2014 and one in 2018. The 2014 survey indicated that there is a substantive difference between the direct question and the experimental question. The level of tolerance for corruption is much higher than the other methodological instruments point out. Comparison with the 2018 experiment allowed the validation and extrapolation of the results found by Moisés and Nunes de Oliveira (2018).