Combating corruption could hurt Brazil’s political stability

Why is Brazil once again mired in political chaos?

Less than a year ago, President Dilma Rousseff was forced out of office in a swirl of claims about financial impropriety. Now her successor, Michel Temer, finds his presidency in peril as well.

Tapes that recently surfaced appear to capture Temer, who was already under investigation for corruption, approving of bribes paid to a lawmaker who has been jailed for corruption. Many now believe he will face impeachment.

On Wednesday, Temer deployed the military in the capital, Brasília, after thousands of protesters clashed with police. Many saw the move as a sign of profound insecurity from a weak government.

Political science suggests this is an example of how the “islands of honesty” in corrupt systems can clash with networks of entrenched corruption, both provoking and spoiling efforts by elites to protect themselves.

And as the honest forces and the corrupt ones struggle against each other, their clashes can have unpredictable effects on the political system.

“We have to have a pact,” Romero Jucá, an influential legislator, was recorded saying in March 2016, to Sergio Machado, a former executive at a subsidiary of the Petrobras oil company, as the two men discussed the need to replace Rousseff to protect themselves and others from corruption charges.

In Brazil, opposition politicians and other elites, including Machado and Jucá, cooperated to impeach Rousseff in August.

Many analysts believe the charges against her were minor.

Some politicians saw the impeachment as a chance to force Rousseff’s Workers Party from power, said Ken Roberts, a political scientist at Cornell University who studies Latin America. But others seem to have believed that a new government would shut down a corruption inquiry that had implicated much of the political and economic elite, and that Rousseff had refused to block.