Anticorruption Agencies in Democracies

Abstract

This dissertation explains how governments can take meaningful (and less meaningful) steps to fight corruption when they face intense domestic pressure to clean up their act. Lawmakers create anticorruption agencies - specialized bodies of a permanent nature with comprehensive national jurisdiction and tasked with combating and/or preventing corruption. These agencies typically combine prevention, public outreach and awareness raising, policy coordination, investigation and prosecution efforts. In some cases, rulers hope to fool constituents and engage in window-dressing by setting up the newly created body for failure; they equip it with weak powers, effectively hindering its ability to actually combat corruption. However, faced with pressure from international non-governmental organizations or international bodies that exercise political and economic leverage, governments can be urged or coerced to give formal punitive powers to anticorruption bodies, and allow them to fully operate and fulfill their stated mandate. The proliferation and empowerment of anticorruption agencies around the world in the last decades thus constitute a testament to complex pressures from domestic and international factors; this dissertation considers both levels seriously to focus on three analytic dimensions of anticorruption agencies around the world: the timing of their establishment, their institutional power and their empowerment.