Corruption and judicial system: the (in)effectiveness of the judicial system against corruption

Abstract

There is a widespread perception in Brazil that civil servants caught in corrupt practices are not punished. Yet, until now, there was no hard evidence that would support such claim and some argued that this was just a misleading perception due to the recent increase in anti-corruption measures. one of the main reasons for this notable absence is the difficulty of identifying actual cases of corruption to evaluate whether the agents are actually being punished by the judicial system or not. This article uses the brazilian triple responsibility system as a natural experiment to assess judicial system performance against corruption. our results show that in fact the brazilian judicial system is highly ineffective against corruption with a lower than 5% probability of conviction