Resilient Corrupted Coalitions: How Anti-Corruption Operations Reshaped Coalition-Building in Brazil’s Congress

To govern, minority presidents in fragmented parliaments deploy both formal and informal coalition-building methods. While the former involves endowments such as agenda-setting power, the latter might sometimes be associated with corruption. Corrupt coalition-building methods include lucrative appointments, favorable business treatment in public procurement, direct financial inducement, and electoral favors, among others. When corrupt methods become central to coalition-building aimed at securing legislative support for the Executive’s agenda, these government branches can be seen as shielding misconduct from the general institutional oversight of judicial and control bodies through secrecy (akin to omertà), legislation against oversight bodies, and political deals. This is because they collude to expand corrupt rents while keeping risks of exposure low. Accordingly, literature often covers the Executive-Legislative link, but the influence of the Judiciary and control bodies on coalition-building methods once anti-corruption operations breach this “blockage” is little explored. Hence, this article investigates the impact of large anti-corruption operations on informal methods of coalition formation. By understanding this impact, one can more accurately assess the long-term legacies of anti-corruption efforts and design policies that complement and strengthen anti-corruption movements, ultimately enhancing the quality of government. This article uses Brazil as a typical case study, analyzing the development of significant anti-corruption operations during each Brazilian presidency from 2003 to 2018—Lula (2003-2010), Dilma (2011-2016), and Temer (2016-2018)—through a theory-testing process-tracing approach. Under these presidencies, anti-corruption operations led to greater public and judicial scrutiny of some types of corrupt practices, decreasing their attractiveness and leading to political instability. The Presidency and politicians repeatedly reinvented themselves to sustain governability, ultimately reinventing the way they engaged with corruption itself: Altering the intensity of coalition-building methods or adopting innovative ones. As for the presidents, the ability with which they assembled a cohesive coalition was critical for their political survival and the intrusiveness of anti-corruption operations.