Imaginaries of anti-corruption
Progressive and Conservative agendas in Chile and the United States
University of Trento
Vilnius University
2026-04-15
Corruption as a Monolith?
Anti-corruption is often treated as a global norm with a universally shared meaning
However, recent work by Katzarova (2024, 2019) that the global anti-corruption agenda began as a struggle between two competing visions between the Global North and the Global South.
We extend this framework to determine whether anti-corruption has also been structured by rival political-economic imaginaries.
We draw on the literature on policy narratives (Shanahan et al. 2018; Jones and McBeth 2010) to determine if anti-corruption imaginaries reflect opposing economic paradigms.
Narrative Policy Framework (NPF)
| Narrative element | Description |
|---|---|
| Characters | The participants in a policy narrative. |
| Victim | The entity hurt by a specified condition. |
| Villain | The entity responsible for the damage done to the victim. |
| Hero | The entity designated as fixing, or being able to fix, the problem. |
| Evidence or setting | Support used to demonstrate the problem, usually tied to real-world features of the policy environment. |
| Causal mechanism | The cause-and-effect relationship that explains how the problem is produced. |
| Moral of the story | The policy solution offered to solve the problem. |
| Plot | The story device that links characters, evidence, causal mechanism, and solution. |
Based on Shanahan et al (2013, 459)
Imaginaries of Anti-Corruption
| Narrative dimension | Progressive anti-corruption imaginary | Conservative anti-corruption imaginary |
|---|---|---|
| Corrupting force | Concentrated private power, corporate influence, and structural privilege | Political discretion, bureaucratic abuse, and public-sector rent seeking |
| Problem definition | Corruption includes capture, money in politics, and the conversion of economic power into political advantage | Corruption is mainly rule breaking, bribery, weak enforcement, and abuse by public officials |
| Threatened good | Democratic accountability, fairness, inclusion, and protection from domination | Probity, legality, administrative discipline, and economic freedom |
| Typical villain | Networks of economic and political elites that use private power to shape public decisions | Corrupt officials, clientelist politicians, bureaucrats, and rent seekers |
| Causal mechanism | Market power distorts democratic politics and public decision-making | State discretion distorts markets and enables private extraction through public office |
| Moral of the story | Limit private influence over politics through oversight, regulation, transparency, and public accountability | Limit arbitrary public power through rules, compliance, sanctions, and administrative discipline |
Macro Policy Narratives
We use the NPF because it allows us to operationalize narrative elements (characters, settings, etc.) and analzye different levels of abstraction (micro, meso, macro).
We focus on macro-narratives (Stauffer 2023) that recur across countries, administrations, and historical periods.
We examine a broad sample of speeches, law initiatives, and policy documents to look for archetypical structural elements.
We identify explicit and implied frames of who is imagined as the corrupting force, who is cast as the victim, what causal mechanism is implied, and what remedy is deemed legitimate.
Case Selection
Why Chile and the United States?
Both countries were pivotal in the internationalization of anti-corruption, but through different routes.
Chile
Earlier Global South critique of corporate power, foreign influence, and international economic asymmetry.
United States
FCPA-centered anti-bribery path, later shaping the OAS and OECD conventions.
Why these administrations?
The cases cover comparable historical periods and opposite ends of each domestic political spectrum.
| Progressive | Conservative |
|---|---|
| Salvador Allende, 1970–1973 | Richard Nixon, 1969–1974 |
| Michelle Bachelet, 2006–2010, 2014–2018 | Augusto Pinochet, 1974–1990 |
| Barack Obama, 2009–2017 | Ronald Reagan, 1981–1989 |
Nixon and Allende
| Narrative dimension | Allende | Nixon/Ford |
|---|---|---|
| Corrupting force | Denounced corporations’ “economic power, political influence and corrupting action.” | Corporate bribery abroad, later narrowed through disclosure and FCPA logic |
| Villain frame | Transnational corporations, ITT, foreign capital | “Questionable payments” by firms, but framed as bribery abroad |
| Victim frame | Sovereignty, democracy, development. Copper nationalization framed as correcting a “historical injustice.” | Addressing the “erosion of confidence” in the free market system |
| Causal mechanism | Economic power captures political decision-making | Bribes distort fair competition and foreign governance |
| Policy moral | Regulate multinational corporate power | Criminalize or disclose foreign bribery |
Allende articulates the broader progressive critique, while the US path narrows anti-corruption into an anti-bribery agenda.
Pinochet and Reagan
| Narrative dimension | Pinochet | Reagan |
|---|---|---|
| Corrupting force | Politicized state power and public-sector disorder. | Government waste, fraud, taxation, and welfare abuse. |
| Villain frame | Allende-era officials, bureaucracy, and political mobilization. | Bureaucrats, wasteful programs, corrupt welfare systems, and dictatorships. |
| Victim frame | Chile as heir to “moral and administrative corruption”; officials accused of encouraging “laziness and unhealthy idleness.” | “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” |
| Causal mechanism | Political intervention corrupts administration and economic life. | Public discretion wastes resources and distorts markets. |
| Policy Moral | Depoliticize the economy, privatize, and reduce direct state intervention. | Limit government, cut waste, discipline administration, and restore market confidence. |
Pinochet and Reagan converge on a conservative imaginary in which corruption comes from politics, bureaucracy, and state intervention rather than from concentrated private power.
Bachelet and Obama
| Narrative dimension | Bachelet | Obama |
|---|---|---|
| Corrupting force | Money in politics, conflicts of interest, and influence peddling. | Corporate capture, lobbying, and offshore secrecy. |
| Villain frame | Denounced actos that “use the power of their money to influence democratic decisions.” | Criticized that Citizens United would “open the floodgates for special interests.” |
| Victim frame | Democratic legitimacy, citizen trust, market integrity, and public probity. | Elections, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, and democratic accountability. |
| Causal mechanism | Private money and access enter public decision-making through campaign finance and conflicts of interest. | Wealth and corporate influence distort elections, regulation, and tax transparency. |
| Policy moral | Probity, transparency, conflict-of-interest rules, and political finance reform. | Disclosure, campaign finance reform, regulatory oversight, and international tax transparency. |
Bachelet and Obama revive the progressive concern with money in politics and capture, but express it through the modern technocratic vocabulary of probity, transparency, integrity, and market credibility.
Conclusions
Anti-corruption discourse does not merely denounce the violation of universally accepted norms, but narratively organizes rival political-economic imaginaries about whether the state or the market is the primary source of corruption.
Anti-corruption agendas are politically powerful as they let actors argue about the proper boundary between state and market while appearing to defend a universal public good.
By the 1990s and 2000s, both imaginaries entered the shared language of transparency, probity, integrity, compliance, and governance. While the progressive agenda adopted elements from the conservative imaginary, the opposite was not true.
Thank you for your attention!
I am a computational social scientist studying how narratives impact financial governance and anti-corruption policies. Alongside research, I have taught several courses on data science for social scientists and regularly share and review open-source tools.
For information more visit my personal website.
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