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Anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) are facing mounting pressure from national governments, public opinion, donors and international organizations to demonstrate objective results. Debates on the performance of ACAs tend to devote little attention to the causal structure of performance and often take place in a context in which the agency is absent or unprepared to refute allegations of inefficiency and institutional failure loosely formulated against its existence. The aim of this paper is to discuss issues of institutional failure by focusing on the politics and processes underlining performance evaluations of ACAs. Why is it important to evaluate the performance of institutions? How does performance relate to legitimacy and how have ACAs been performing along the three dimensions of legitimacy? What indicators have been developed by agencies and what do they measure? Finally, to what extent evaluation procedures are fundamental to the work and durability of ACAs?

One distinctive feature of the anti-corruption activity of the 1990s is the rise of new players, such as specialized anti-corruption bodies. Anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) are public bodies of a durable nature, with a specific mission to fight corruption and reducing the opportunity structures propitious for its occurrence in society through preventive and/or repressive measures. Independently of their format and powers, ACAs encounter various constraints to their mandate, which explains the meagre results obtained by some of them: difficulties (technical, statutory or cultural) in unveiling corruption via complaints; difficulties in obtaining information about corruption and its opportunity structures from other state bodies/agencies; and difficulties in establishing a good working relationship with the political sphere. The burgeoning literature on corruption suggests that the most important issues are the incidence of the phenomenon itself (causes, contexts, processes and effects). Instead, this article argues that anti-corruption activity should now be regarded as an important object of study in its own right. The purpose of this paper is to understand the rise, future, and implications of this new kind of "integrity warriors" and to locate them in the evolving doctrine of corruption control.

In this paper, I sketch out Merleau-Ponty's theory of subjectivity as it is presented in the Phenomenology of Perception. I will start by showing that Merleau-Ponty's theory presupposes Sartre's notion of consciousness as anonymous and pre-reflective. Merleau-Ponty takes up these features and embeds them in the lived body. The result is Merleau-Ponty's notion of the tacit cogito as pre-reflective subjectivity, always presupposed in our everyday embodied engagement with the world and in every explicit reflexive grasp of ourselves as such. Further, I show that the outcome of reflection, the spoken cogito, presupposes linguistic ability and thus the expressive power of the body. In the end I argue that, contrary to Sartre, who viewed pre-reflective consciousness as a nothing, for Merleau-Ponty the lived body or tacit cogito is always something in and of the world.

"Delving into the phenomenology of corruption and its impacts on the governance of societies, this cutting edge Encyclopedia considers what makes corruption such a resilient, complex, and global priority for study. Entries cover diverse topics concerning corruption, looking at their definitions and variations, prevalence, causal factors, governance impacts, and control policies, as well as emerging issues and new challenges such as the strategic use of corruption and the role of technology in fighting it. With coverage ranging from classic corruption themes to high-profile cases and up-and-coming topics, entries explore anti-corruption agencies, ethics committees and management, gender and corruption, gift giving, organized crime, police corruption, sextortion, tax evasion, whistleblowing, and white-collar crime. Combining different methodological approaches, this Encyclopedia delineates corruption as a powerful means of influencing public policy. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, this Encyclopedia will be an indispensable reference work for students and scholars of regulation and governance, public policy and administration, economic crime and corruption, the sociology of corruption, and terrorism and security studies. It will also benefit policymakers and specialized anti-corruption bodies looking to refresh their knowledge. Key Features: 79 wide-ranging entries organized alphabetically for accessibility and ease of navigation. Written by 92 esteemed scholars and practitioners from around the world. Includes relevant bibliographic references supporting conceptual, theoretical, and analytical arguments"--

PurposeThe two main objectives of this project were to advance knowledge about the way corruption and related offences are structured and operate in society and to draw inferences on the efficiency and efficacy of the judicial authorities in handling reported offences with the ultimate goal of improving and effecting control policies.Design/methodology/approachIn this research note the authors attempt to explore the relevance of judicial materials. The authors developed an analytical framework to extract information from court case decisions and analysed 838 court cases on corruption and related offences in Portuguese first instance courts for the period 2004–2008 to map the distribution of corruption and related offences, understand the anatomy of corruption as a criminal offence and learn from the judicial system's capacity to investigate, prosecute and trial reported occurrences.FindingsMost corruption cases took place in the major metropolitan areas, involved municipalities as passive agents and construction companies as active agents and had to do with urban sprawl and land management policies. Court data also allowed the authors to gauge the areas or sectors of activity more exposed to corruption risks. Generally speaking, these tend to be those areas or sectors characterized by high levels of informality and clientelism, high profitability ratios deriving from political decisions, unbalanced supply-demand of decisional goods and services, disorganised and fragmented regulation, low levels of transparency and insufficient or misguided supervision.Research limitations/implicationsThe framework for analysis is replicable in other contexts with minor adjustments. The major limitation is access to court decisions/narratives. This project was developed in partnership with the Portuguese Public Prosecutor's Office. This has facilitated access to those materials. For those wishing to use the database, the major limitation is that it covers only the period 2004–2008.Practical implicationsThe court narratives confirm that in cases where the complaint is complemented by documentary, audio, video and photographic evidences collected by special investigative means the subsequent production of proof in court is more effective. The data also suggests that cases reported from inside the organisation where the offence takes place are likelier to reach the trial phase, thus reinforcing the need for diversifying and strengthening reporting mechanisms and procedures and the guarantees to those who are willing to collaborate with the auditing and investigative authorities.Social implicationsThe authors contend that court cases of corruption and related offences yield important and useful policy-oriented information that should not be overlooked by decision-makers when upgrading their efforts to fight corruption.Originality/valueThis research note introduces a novel dataset on corruption court cases in Portugal. The policy significance of this dataset is threefold: (1) it provides decision-makers a more detailed mapping of the volume and distribution of corruption and related offences across the country than that provided by standard judicial statistics; (2) it fosters knowledge on key sociological aspects of the corrupt fact, thus helping decision-makers to understand better the type of actors, objectives, contexts, resources and exchanges involved and (3) it helps to understand the dynamics of judicial proceedings and how certain procedural and institutional features impact on outcomes.

Corruption is deviant behaviour from legal and social norms, observable in both dictatorships and democracies, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind. Studying corruption in dictatorships is particularly challenging due to the fact that freedom of expression is censored and there is little (if any) reliable information about the enforcement of legal provisions. This article provides a contribution to the growing literature on the role of legislatures in dictatorships by focusing on parliamentary debates on corruption as a discourse control mechanism. The case of the Portuguese legislature during theEstado Novois paradigmatic in that regard. The National Assembly, as it will be demonstrated in this article, was able to shift the debate on corruption from the legal to the moral dimension and, thus, deprive citizens, and in particular the opposition, of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable for their misconduct.