1 Introduction

Grand corruption affairs, and the arrest of politicians and high-ranking executives, has ignited the debate about the strategic action of law enforcers and the effects produced on democracy and political institutions. Other authors have already focused on the political uses of Law and the consequences of the fight against corruption in Brazil. But after all, what do legal professionals, working inside and outside the administration of justice, think about the people labeled white-collar criminals in the cases they sentence, accuse, and defend? The objective of this work is to advance the research agenda on the point of convergence between Law and Politics by shedding light on the action orientation of members of the justice system.

Rather than looking at the institutional design (Praça & Taylor, 2014; Madeira & Geliski, 2019; Kerche, 2018; Kerche and Marona 2022) or the interaction between agents within the accountability network (Castro & Ansari, 2017; Sadek, 2019; Oliveira et al., 2017; Engelmann & Menuzzi, 2020; Almeida, 2019; Sá & Silva, 2020), our gaze shifts to the actors and their cultural repertoires. Using qualitative interviews with the group of experts on corruption and white-collar crime, we will reconstruct the collective mindsets that underlie the actions of members of this professional complex. The objective problem of action, to which the interpretative patterns respond, is the relationship between the political and economic sectors. Collective mindsets are enunciated by judges, prosecutors, and lawyers with previous experience in corruption cases. By analyzing the worldviews held by this group our aim is to understand, focusing on the relationship between both sectors, where they locate the problem of corruption and who are its main participants in the Brazilian context.

Sources of empirical material are 24 in-depth interviews in which professionals experienced in major corruption scandals throughout Brazilian history (1985–2021) articulate ideas about the economy and politics. Our investigation of legal professionals’ understanding of corruption and the links between the political and economic sectors uses the hermeneutic methodology of Collective Mindset Analysis (CMA). From the epistemological point of view, the stocks of knowledge acquired and built up by the various societies make it easier for the individuals within them to classify situations, problems, crises (Schütz, 1971), as for example the phenomenon of corruption. Mapping such knowledge stocks allows us to understand not only the meaning behind the actions of a given group, but also to identify in which institutions they are anchored.

After this introduction, the second section discusses the theoretical-methodological choices, followed by the presentation of the results of the Collective Mindset Analysis (CMA). The third section introduces the Brazilian institutional setting, focusing on the anticorruption legal complex. Finally, the results are discussed in the fourth section and at the end research implications are outlined.

2 Theoretical and Methodological Approach

We know of the moral conception of legal practitioners in modern society (Karpik, 2007; Parsons, 1937, 1939), and that compared to other professionals such as doctors or engineers, lawyers have notable advantages in political mobilization given their ability to exercise moral authority in the name of technical competence (Halliday, 1985). An extensive body of studies labeled “political lawyering” (Karpik, 2007), has suggested that the affinities between jurists and individual liberties is a historical reality, but factors external to the professional ethos, such as a class logic, may anchor illiberal decisions by legal professionals (Couso, 2006). We enter the topic of the nexus between legal professionals, politics and the economy by following an agentic perspective on experts from the anticorruption complex.

The understanding legal actors have about the phenomenon of corruption, that is the worldviews they hold of the two poles involved, bribe-givers and bribe-takers, can only be indirectly accessed. Therefore, we will reconstruct the collective mindsets activated by the group under examination using qualitative interviews conducted for the purpose of applying this interpretive method (CMA) based on the social constructivism of Peter Berger und Thomas Luckmann (1967). The study’s specific objective is to map on which set of available knowledge, beliefs, and value systems the actions of this subgroup are anchored. More generally, we aim to understand what stock of knowledge is activated in that particular society and context to interpret corrupt behavior. We may hypothesize that, as members of the legal system, the knowledge base and symbolic representations through which the group interprets laws are more uniform than the interpretations of others regarding the same symbols. Our investigation will look concretely at the narratives related to confronting corruption found among judges, prosecutors, and lawyers working in the Brazilian field. We will follow this question with the support of a method that enables to answer which cognitive and normative institutions are among the stocks of knowledge accessed by these agents to understand and locate the phenomenon of corruption.

Within and across institutional settings, including professions, discursive interaction forges meanings, values, commitments, and worldviews, providing individuals with a shared stock of knowledge (Schütz, 1971; Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Schütz & Luckmann, 2003), also understood as cultural repertoires. The existing literature on cultural repertoires typically employs the qualitative paradigm, such as in-depth interviews (Lamont, 1992), case studies (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006), content analysis of communications produced by a specific community (Weber et al., 2013). Drawing on more recent efforts to study repertoires, or collective mindsets, within a specific group (Valarini, 2018; Valarini et al., 2015; Valarini & Pohlmann, 2016; Elias, 2019; Klinkhammer, 2018; Höly, 2018) and a profession (Pohlmann, Höly & Trombini, 2022), and about the public–private (corrupt) relationship (Valarini, 2021), this study will apply the hermeneutic method of Collective Mindsets Analysis (original Deutungsmusteranalyse, denoted here by the abbreviation CMA) to interviews made with practitioners in the anti-corruption complex.

Ullrich Oevermann (2001a, b) originally developed CMA as a technique to study shared ways of understanding a phenomenon. The prerequisite for the emergence of patterns of interpretation, or mindsets, is an objective problem of action which is shared by individuals in a society or a sub-group in it. Faced with a specific circumstance, each individual uses socially available collective mindsets that offer appropriate, and thus reciprocally recognized, interpretations of the underlying situation. To allow ordinary or exceptional problems to be dealt with routinely, such patterns of interpretation attain the status of a stand-alone entity, existing independently of agency. In this paper, the action problem dealt with is corruption and where it is located according to the group studied. One of the advantages of the chosen qualitative method is that collective mindsets are relatively temporally stable contents of social knowledge accumulated in a society. This is because in order to deal with the different everyday spheres of interpretation and action of social phenomena and processes,Footnote 1 societal groups and subgroups store, based on their biographical experiences, common ways of interpreting and evaluating a phenomenon or a situation. Such repositories of historical and social references achieve validity within that group and facilitate knowledge allocation, helping social actors simplify complex situations without having to interpret each situation as if it were unique (Meuser & Sackmann, 1992; Oevermann, 2001b; Sachweh, 2010). The manifestation of collective mindsets takes the form of derivations—explanations, justifications, and narratives about a fact, issue, phenomenon, etc.—when actors are questioned or asked to explain their actions, decisions, beliefs, etc. Thus, methodologically, it is not the collective mindset itself that is directly accessed, but the derivations, that is, the meaning, explanation and justification attributed to a specific problem (Ullrich, 1999). Our purpose with the qualitative analysis is to identify the “recipes” or guidance orientations containing unwritten rules that govern action within the societal group being studied (Bögelein & Vetter, 2019).

Our database for the qualitative analysis is comprised of 24 interviews conducted between 2017 and 2021 stratified by quotas of career, gender, and place of work (Appendix I). The choice of interviewees was based on the definition of experts by Meuser and Nagel (1989) so the specialists who are part of the field of action constitute the research object. Selection of interviewees was based on the following criteria: (1) legal professionals: lawyers, judges, and prosecutors; who (2) have acted and/or were acting in cases of corruption and financial crimes, at the time of the interviews, whose relationships between the economic sector (executives and companies) and the political sector (politicians and parties) are or were in evidence; and (3) that the cases were being handled in the federal jurisdiction.

Although the status of expert is relational, since it depends mainly on the interest and research problem, it is attributed to the actors who have privileged access to information about the object, about specific groups of people, or even about decision-making processes (Meuser, & Nagel, 1989). Thus, experts within an organizational context, as is the case of the interviewees from the anti-corruption complex, are actors who have tasks, responsibilities, as well as unique experiences and knowledge acquired during their trajectory. The actors of the justice system interviewed for this work are understood as experts in the policy area of corruption and money laundering.

The interviews were conducted in Portuguese, recorded in audio and then transcribed using NVivo software and manually corrected. To analyze the qualitative material, the Collective Mindset Analysis analytical method developed by Pohlmann et al. (2014) was employed.

The selected text passages were analyzed by the authors, first individually and then jointly, to reduce subjectivity in the analysis. For the operationalization, different thematic text passages related to corruption and its main participants were coded using the MAXQDA software. Both specific questions from the questionnaire that had the purpose to prompt responses in this regard as well as text passages related to the research problem triggered without the direct stimulus were considered. The deductive-inductive process allowed latent structures of meaning and knowledge accessed by the interviewees to be found. Beyond theoretical assumptions that the group understands corruption as a phenomenon where economic and political participants are equally to blame, these latent structures, when systematically analyzed, provide more trustworthiness to our qualitative research.

Considering legal professionals as experts, we are assuming that their professional action would be guided by group-specific collective mindsets. Because the theoretical approach established that they wield influence in the anti-corruption complex, we also expect them to be playing a key role in the formation and diffusion of mindsets about corruption and its main participants. Against this backdrop, findings of the CMA method are explained drawing on neo institutionalism to explain the mindsets of Brazilian experts in light of other supporting structures. The search for knowledge and cultural repertoires activated by the group is part of steps 7 and 8 of the method (see Table 1).

Table 1 The eight steps for the Collective Mindset Analysis
Full size table

In this chapter, we will present the justifications and narratives of legal professionals about corruption and its main participants.

3 The Anti-Corruption Legal Complex in Recent Decades

In the last decade Brazil has seen a strengthening of the institutional capacities of existing bodies and the creation and implementation of new ones with respect to fighting corruption (Da Ros, 2019; Rico, 2014; Speck, 2000). In the terminology of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, what exists is an anticorruption normative microsystem that encompasses several legal diplomas, disciplining the legal consequences of corrupt practices, notably state sanctions produced in different spheres of accountability, and assigns to public agencies the tasks of control and sanction of illicit practices (MPF, 2017). In terms of efficiency, the coordinated action between prosecutors and federal police officers in the use of mechanisms to investigate and control suspicious activities indicates a maturation in these two members of the microsystem (Arantes, 2011).

The number of political corruption cases prosecuted at the federal level was a result of this accumulation of organizational maturity. According to the creator of the specialized courts for crimes against the national financial system and money laundering “With these courts came the Banestado case, then the Mensalão and now the Lava Jato. The greatest recent achievement of the Brazilian judiciary was the creation of the money laundering courts, which inspired several countries”.Footnote 2 The incentives to concentrate material and human efforts in a single administrative unit within the justice system go beyond structural aspects, and specialized personnel become an isolated advantage. The Lava Jato Task Force, created at the Public Ministry, Brazil’s accusatory organ, was composed of some of the characters that made up the CC5 Task Force, responsible for the Banestado Case, one of the largest police operations on financial crimes in Brazil and a pioneer in cooperation with international control agencies. At the time, the Federal Justice of Paraná already had a specialized court, in which the former judge Sérgio Moro accumulated institutional learningFootnote 3. Because of the interaction between the various parties in this fit, formal rules and institutional increments not only constrained the actors, but gave them the possibility to significantly alter and reshape each organization and its setting incrementally (Praça & Taylor, 2014).

From a geopolitical point of view, like other initiatives in the context of the new global order, financial crime regulations were led by the United States (Slaughter, 2004; Franco & Wood, 2010; Tourinho, 2018). A multilateral act to sanction bribery of foreign officials was signed under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1997 (Saglibene, 2014). From then on, international organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank established a normative vision of good governance, and played a key role in the dissemination of New Public Management ideas (Brinkerhoff; Brinkerhoff 2015).

In parallel, professions and globalization have become intertwined, with lawyers, as economists, serving as epistemic brokers of ideas flowing through the transnational and domestic fields (Dezalay, 2004; Dezalay & Garth, 2002; Flood, 1996; Galanter, 1983; Kauppi & Madsen, 2014; Liu, 2008; Trubek et al., 1994). The transnational circulation of tangible and intangible resources and the consequences it produces within the legal complex is an endeavor of a multitude of actors (state bureaucrats, intellectuals, NGOs, etc.) combining uniformity with local differentiation (B. d. S. Santos, 1992; Trombini and Valarini, 2023). Because our study is empirical, addressing intentionality depends on accessing a particular arena and examining it at the actor-level. An example is the analysis by Ribeiro (2017) that shows how actors engaged in anti-corruption initiatives influence policy-making and were key in convincing parliamentarians to approve the Brazilian law on criminal organizations (Law 12.850/13). Acting as an interest group, prosecutors, judges and other members in the anti-corruption complex successfully formed a coalition with actors from the public safety policy subsystem, thereby diminishing the importance of the special investigative tools that would then be used in corruption and white-collar crime investigations.

To gain a visual understanding of how the anti-corruption policy arena was constructed, the chronology of events is helpful. This institutionalization happened around a shared vocabulary (legislation), tools (organizational systems), and spaces (forums and networks). We will call anti-corruption complex the empirical space in which actors from state bureaucracies and other legal professionals specialized in the defense of financial crimes interact.

A timeline of major events in Brazil from 2000 to 2016. It starts with the Anti-money Laundering Law 2001, the Clean Record Law 2010, an amendment of the Anti-money Laundering Law 2012, the anti-corruption law, Law and Criminal Organizations 2013, and Integrity Requirements for Companies 2016.

Developed by the authors

Timeline 1: Major Institutional Changes and Events in the Brazilian Context in the Last Decades.

4 Where Do Legal Professionals Situate the Problem of Corruption?

The analysis of the knowledge and cultural repertoire activated by the anti-corruption group showed that the political sector and especially the political actors would be the core of the issue. Corruption would be located in the political field and would be attributable to personality traits of individuals who comprise it. Selfish and immoral people who lack moral and formal education would be occupying positions in the state administration, so corruption is understood as the “capture” of public interests for personal gains, such as enrichment, power, continuity and advancement in the political career. A second group of interviewees conceives corruption as something instrumental that serves to achieve both political and corporate objectives. The problem would be located within the electoral system, in which interchangeable actors participate, but with the main objective of supplying the high expenses necessary for the functioning of the political-party system. A smaller part of the interviewees localize corruption at the macro level. Corruption would be anchored in the capitalist model, which place the political “class” at the mercy of economic interests.

Next, we will present the results of the empirical analysis according to the frequency in which the collective mindsets were found among experts in the anti-corruption complex.

5 The Moral Problem of Political Actors

In this collective mindset the problem of corruption is located at the individual level. The actors that make up the political system have individual characteristics that explain their deviant behavior. Thus, corruption consists of a moral and educational problem of personal character, which afflicts the Brazilian political class. To stay in power and in politics politicians need money; therefore, they distance themselves from the purposes and expectations that fall on the holder of public office. Citizens of integrity shy away from this locus, characterized by a lack of integrity, and do not want their image linked to an immoral environment. Politics has undergone a deterioration process in the last decades, accentuated by recent governments. This deterioration is implicitly related to the rise to power of a group of “non-elite”, people who do not meet the expected criteria of having educational and symbolic capital. With the rise of such political actors with no republican principles, the “public” arena has been distorted. However, politicians are not disconnected from society. Because they are elected by the people, the explanation for the composition of an immoral group mirrors the “bad” choice of a large part of the population, which, like the politicians, is made up of individuals with deviant tendencies, who would identify with the models (candidates) willing to run for elective positions. The actors in the justice system, along with some specific social groups, form the small group of people capable of discerning between a “good” and a “bad” candidate.

“I think that this if I do the cashiering is indispensable, the politicians at least see it that way, indispensable to be able to pursue the career, which would be that City Councilor, Representative, Mayor, Governor. And at the same time, the career is important. Unfortunately, I think that in most cases it’s not for the public good etc., but for personal growth, both for enrichment and status. I think that these are two things that, until today, I’ll tell you, in the last few years this has been changing, two, three years I don’t know, but until yesterday it was a very big status to be a deputy, to be a senator, now I’ve noticed that it’s not. I see some politicians, friends of mine, who are leaving and unfortunately usually those who have the most, rightly, integrity and are ashamed to present themselves as. This was not seen here in Brazil” (Federal Judge in Paraná).

“It is possible to separate two main groups: one of them that in my point of view is the worst, which is the corrupt politician, that politician that for many times already enters public office with the intention of doing wrong, wants to get rich, wants to take advantage of public office so for me this group is the most nefarious and many, in my understanding, Although I am not an expert, they border on psychopathy, they are psychopaths who do not face the situation of misery that we live in, they do not face how half of the Brazilians do not have basic sanitation, do not have water treatment, this is absurd, a rich country like ours, we are not a poor country, we are rich. And they close their eyes, they don’t see that, they don’t become a mayor, a governor, a president, a congressman, a senator, to do the best for the people... no, they are there to perpetuate themselves in power and to embezzle public values, employ their friends and family members and continue in power, continue stealing and continue that pattern. These are also considered white-collar criminals, right? (Federal prosecutor in São Paulo)”

The normative structure of this mindset reinforces the role of the politician vis-à-vis society and the abdication of personal and individual aspirations for the sake of a greater good, the public good. The theory of change is based on individual characteristics, like parts that make up a whole. To render politics “clean”, upright and moral, it would be enough to elect new virtuous representatives, eliminating corruption from the Brazilian context. This horizon is not seen by the holders of this mindset as a utopia, but a transformation possible through changing the people in power.

6 Corruption: A System that Feeds and Regulates Itself

The second CM that appears most frequently among the interviewees also locates the problem of corruption in the political sector. Differently from the dominant mindset, this one qualifies the phenomenon as instrumental to both economic and political organizations. Corruption is understood as a system that feeds and regulates itself, obeying its own rules. The competitiveness between parties and candidates for the supply of financial support coming from the market (big companies that need state intervention) and the need to raise votes in increasingly expensive campaigns would be the elements of self-management of this system. The economic system would play a part in this logic, although its relevance has a smaller scale compared to the centrality awarded to the political system in the relationship between both. Such an explanation is not lodged at the micro level, since the dynamics do not depend on specific actors, be they from economic or political organizations, to exist. Although individual interests are not excluded, the focus is on the configuration of the system itself, conceived to accommodate the relationship established between the two poles: state and corporate, public and private.

“I think it’s basically a business view, it’s the business model in Brazil. The Brazilian State is very big, it is very difficult to have a business with really great potential that you don’t have as a client the State, and the State is basically corrupt. So there is no way to do business ethically, you wouldn’t compete, you wouldn’t win bids, you would have countless problems. Sometimes it seems that I’m saying that businessmen are the victims of a harassment by the political class. It is not true. It is a system that feeds itself, I mean, they are not the same as always, the politicians change, but the system is this of relationship, so for them it is a business model and for the politicians it is a model of political financing and also of personal enrichment and this is the system, its actors only change, it is a business model” (Federal prosecutor stationed in Paraná).

“These companies cost money and there is a certain lack of control over this, the campaigns in Brazil are increasingly expensive and the candidate to become competitive often has to have large sums of resources and in this context some fall into this temptation to accept values of criminal origin, right, eh there are so many cases of corruption involving illicit enrichment, as cases in which values of bribery settlements were intended for electoral campaigns right, there are no justifications for this being presented by the convicted for this behavior, because normally, as I said they deny it, but yes I think there is, if there was a decrease in the costs of these campaigns that would also lead to a decrease in the need for resources, it may be that there would be an incentive less, but see there are some cases in which these values were used for illicit enrichment, were not intended for elections” (Federal magistrate stationed in Paraná).

The analogy of corruption as a business system reinforces the interactionist framework of this explanation. Fighting a phenomenon characterized by reciprocity similar to that of market relations is a complex task, which involves reducing the incentives and trying to increase the costs of deviant conducts for each of the sides involved.

7 Political System “Hostage” to the Economic System

The last mindset reconstructs the idea of an economic bourgeoisie which holds power over several social spheres, among them, the Legislative and the Executive. Although politicians exert influence in certain domains, a form of power, they are not, in their great majority, the holders of economic capital, the necessary substratum for the realization of political elections. Mere pieces in a larger gear where class logic is determinant, elected representatives would be servants of the interests of the businessmen who elected them.

“When you see in practice what the parties do, what the politicians do, this group of parties and politicians...there are even politicians that are not members of Congress. Roberto Jefferson is no longer a deputy, but he still has power. So, this whole group, what do they do? They are not bourgeois? not necessarily. There are one or two bourgeois. You get the list of the 500 richest people in Brazil, the politicians are not in it, you know? You have one or another” (Rio de Janeiro lawyer).

One of the rules of interpretation of this mindset is that economic power, because it is what matters most in a society like the Brazilian, or any other capitalist one, dictates the rules of the game and controls which players remain or not in the game. Being a politician offers concrete advantages compared to how much power the majority of the population has access to, but the appearance of power confuses the true reality of a country divided into social strata with an economic elite at the top.

Table: Overview presentation of the results

Corruption

Micro-level

Meso-level

Macro-level

Moral problem of political actors

A system that feeds and regulates itself

Political system “hostage” to the economic system

Understanding

Fulfillment of personal goals and interests to the detriment of collective interests

Party political financing

Realization of economic goals and interests

State or market location

The phenomenon of corruption is more present in the political sector because of the characteristics of its members

The phenomenon of corruption is present in the political sector, but dependent on the interaction with the economic sector, and therefore a financer of the party-political system

The economic sector would be the machinery, maintaining the gears of corruption

Assignment/Agency

The political actors: selfish individuals, devoid of education, ethics and morals, who need financial resources to remain in power

Corruption is a system that feeds and regulates itself (there is no agency). Its self-regulation does not depend on a specific economic organization or political party

Attribution to the economic class. The agency is not in the individuals, but in the economic sector that uses the political pleadings and their needs for the realization of their interests

Consequences and developments

The political arena becomes a non-integral “locus” from which citizens of integrity shy away in order not to have their image linked to an immoral environment

Deterioration of politics historically through rise of the “non-elite”

Misrepresentation of the “public” purpose to the detriment of the private

Since the actors are not responsible for corruption, there is skepticism about the possibilities of action and institutional arrangements to avoid, prevent, or combat corruption

The economic power dictates the rules of the game and controls which of the players remain in the game or not

Causes/origin

Politicians are not disconnected from society: the formation of an immoral locus has its origin in the population’s “bad” ability to choose, constituted, like the politicians, by individuals with deviant tendencies

The competition between parties and candidates vying for financial resources, the need to garner votes, and increasingly expensive campaigns

Society divided into social strata and great power of the economic elite, through the possession of economic capital

Solutions

Discernment between a “good” and “bad” candidate. This suggests better training of voters

Combating a phenomenon characterized by relationships is a complex task, possibilities would be to decrease the incentives and increase the costs of deviant conduct

–

Frequency

Dominant

Second Dominant

Recessive

8 Discussion

In this chapter, we consider which stocks of knowledge guide the action orientation of legal professionals about corruption, taking the relation between the political and economic sectors as our focus. The most recurrent pattern of interpretation among the group “Corruption: moral problem of the political actors” uses psychopathological explanations to interpret and justify deviant behavior, attributing to the individuals belonging to one of the poles of the corrupt relationship the character inclination to commit crimes. Locating the problem of corruption, or of any other deviance, at the micro level is not surprising considering that we are dealing with individuals trained in law and accustomed to calculate guilt based on individual conduct. Imbued with classical theories, in which rule-deviation is considered something “abnormal”, as in criminogenic approaches, such a way of understanding reality is compatible with daily-life experiences and cognitive frames available in the spaces of the justice system.

However, the valence found in relation to politicians is a surprising element of the mindsets. The studied group are experts on the theme, but their way of understanding and locating corruption does not seem to differ from the way corruption is commonly understood by other societal groups. In other words, this does not seem to be a group-specific mindset associated with a certain expertise, given that blaming politicians for corruption is a common sense understanding of this action problem. Scholars of political culture in Brazil have argued that the concept of patrimonialism, the number of corruption scandals, and the way they are portrayed by the media, breeds the idea that the state is the natural space for vices (Filgueiras, 2009). Public officials working in white-collar crime in Brazil are more distrustful of the government than of the private sector, as supported by our findings. Even though the dominant mindsets do not rule out the responsibility and deviant action of the executives, they do so in a lateral way. Only in the recessive mindset (Political system “hostage” of the economic system) the greatest amount of power, and of blame, is attributed to members of the economic class. Numerically, this pattern of interpretation is not expressive within the group.

The mindset that appeared as the second most frequent defines corruption as a reciprocal system “that feeds and regulates itself”. This pattern of interpretation brings a more elaborate understanding of the phenomenon, which distances itself from personified explanations. Because it depends on the interaction of actors from different spheres, financial criminality, also regarded as a way of making business, requires a greater effort to be investigated and fought against. Considering that the holders of this collective mindset are mainly the members of the bureaucracy specialized in financial crime, we may associate this explanation with a professional vanity for the merits achieved in anticorruption investigations. Recognizing the “ecological” dimension of the phenomenon and contributing conceptually to the fight against corruption by emphasizing the procedural instruments that make criminal prosecution more efficient reinforces the Lava Jato group’s attempt to differentiate itself from the rest of the state administration (see Trombini, 2023 for a detailed analysis). While the systemic mindset (“Corruption as a system that feeds and regulates itself”) evokes self-conceit, it points out that there is no solution for the treatment of corruption, because it is a phenomenon that exists regardless of the actors and their agency. The existing points of contact between different sectors are not simply undone when certain actors (political and economic) leave the scene, like the moral mindset posits.

We know that the professions wish to aggrandize themselves, constituting a “jurisdiction” through professional knowledge systems (Abbott, 2005) or socially organized perceptual frameworks (Goodwin, 1996). Here, the stocks of knowledge about corruption and its main participants are contrasted with those of other holders of public office. Members to the anticorruption complex are neither unskilled lawyers too close to local power to hold them accountable for misconduct nor immoral politicians with a penchant for disregarding public interests. Experts ascribe knowledge and moral to themselves, and negatively evaluate politicians on the basis of the absence of these features. They claim to be more tuned with the republican principle of a clear separation between the public and the private, something that the two most dominant mindsets consider to be lacking in how corporate-state relations unfold at the Brazilian context.

The results of the CMA show that experts are preoccupied with providing answers to the question of how to best perform in the public interest. Efficiency and ethics are the key concepts guiding the cultural repertoire of legal professionals when inquired about corruption. Searching for normative and regulative institutions at the judicial field where the expert group studied is inserted helps explain the findings. The context in which these professionals are embedded is permeated by a certain vision of good governance and infused with ideas from new public management. To face the challenge of drawing a separation between the public and the private, the old-developmentalist and statist ideas (linked to corruption) should be replaced by a conservative liberal credo (linked to a competitive market). Rather than finding a way between the two extremes, as Bresser-Pereira (2001) recommended, they seem to insist on following the same steps given by Western European countries and the United States.

In common, lawyers, prosecutors, and judges suggest that the problem of corruption can be addressed by changing the “quality” of the political professional with the entry of people of “good character”, bearers of morality. By doing so, they draw a distinction (Bourdieu, 1984): on the one hand there is a qualified civil service, recruited on the basis of merit, on the other, “unskilled” elected authorities that are not exposed to competition—either because the electorate cannot vote, or because party dynamics make competition dysfunctional, and corruption self-feeding. It is interesting to point out that these interpretative patterns, anchored in the belief of the advantages of meritocracy, are not shared by other elite groups in Brazil, especially professionals from which technocratic thinking would be expected, such as top executives at STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

The knowledge stocks of the Brazilian economic elite are more guided by instrumental concerns. State regulation of economic activities is understood as a necessary element for the survival of companies operating in Brazil, and problems of misconduct are seen as something that must be solved within the organizational environment (Valarini, 2018). Unlike the experts in the anti-corruption complex, the interpretation patterns of senior executives are more anchored in elements that symbolize paternalistic relationships, present in the political-economic environment, brought in parts by the neodevelopmentalist model, than elements acquired by the profession. As such, their understanding of efficiency and ethics is closely connected to doing business in a Latin American country.

The timeline of events depicted above showed that changes in legislation and institutional design created an anticorruption legal complex. A double movement of judicialization of conflicts and politicization of judicial institutions (Arantes, 2007) has awarded a central role to the actors employed in these bureaucracies. Their understanding of corruption portrays politicians as selfish, and executives as rational, the State as the place of vices, and the market of merit. If the professional independence of judges and prosecutors allows them to represent citizens’ interests, the technocratic basis of their decisions (Pádua, 2008) and the low social control they experience (Bresser Pereira, 2007) are negative factors. The same elements that grant control bodies necessary autonomy to investigate and judge high executives and politicians offer them a chance to reshape the electoral, social, and economic landscape without having to be elected.

Their advice for how to best perform in the public interest involves professionalism, impersonal selection through entrance competitions, and increased autonomy from political influence. The most dominant mindset vocalizes a resentment against the political elites. A potential explanation is that the interviewees do not come from the same families that traditionally occupied the judiciary before public competitions and the creation of the Public Ministry, in a historical period when political, business and judicial elites all belonged to a single uniform group. According to Grün (2011), the newly arrived individuals in the elites are usually the main operators of scandals, the “champions of justice” and traditional moral principles that would be ignored by the dominant elites. Yet our work (Trombini et al., 2022) with prosopographical data from the anticorruption group has showed that the majority comes from an elite background. Still, the moral mindset agrees that politicians are who to blame.

This brings us to an ambiguous aspect of the mindsets. Not all politicians are considered to be immoral, and the emergence of a systemic pattern of corruption is regarded as a phenomenon from recent history. Legal professionals suggest that greater pluralism (an intrinsic requirement for democratic consolidation) has been responsible for increasing the distances between the “virtuous” senior civil servant and this other less respectable public officials at a “contaminated” political space. There were the politics of before and the politics of now, with skilled people staying in the market instead of running for office. This stance, of elitist arrogance, is opposed to populist resentment, but the two often go together. Writing about such unexpected companions, Galston (2014) cautioned that “public-spirited individuals who genuinely want to promote the public interest can end up longing for a form of leadership that is not regularly accountable to the people”.

Blaming out-groups for corruption did not come as a surprise, neither did blaming the political group that was in power in the last decades, while scandals like the Mensalão and Lava Jato took place. Recent episodes that placed members of the high echelons of the political and economic system in prison show that members of the anticorruption complex behave like elite challengers (Johansson & Uhlin, 2020). Noteworthy is that rather than allying themselves to other ruling elites, like in the past (Love & Barickman, 1986; Adorno, 1988; Werneck Vianna, 1999; Carvalho, 2003; Almeida, 2010), the elite from the anticorruption complex is more selective when deciding who to challenge. They still exhibit liberal ideologies and conservatism, which might explain why they attribute blame to a certain political group. Together with resentment over the loss of privileges, conservatism is another motivation for antipetism, being against the PT, or Worker’s Party (Aquino, 2019). Other investigations into the political uses of law by experts, in public administration particularly, still need to shed light on the interplay between individual and professional characteristics that may affect variance in mindsets. Focusing on class, ideology and career might be a promising route for addressing convergence and divergence in cultural repertoires.

9 Conclusions

We started from a question about the meeting point between Law and Politics to look at the empirical space of the professionals working in the anti-corruption complex. Our results show that the bearers of the reconstructed patterns locate the problem of corruption among politicians, by looking at the micro (immoral individuals) or meso (political system) levels. Their mindsets criticize patrimonialism and a lack of separation between the public and private domains and recommend efficiency and ethics, two features of the anticorruption complex, to remedy that. Not all politicians are blamed and labeled corrupt, and resentment and arrogance help explaining who is regarded as guilty and unskilled. The fact that the subpopulation of lawyers, prosecutors and judges working on corruption scandals does not recognize itself as agents highlights the importance of using qualitative methods to get a grip at the self-presentations of the group. In representative democracies with electoral systems, the autonomy of legal professionals employed at state careers that enable them to do policy-making must be checked, as other contributions in this volume argue.

One can safely admit that not only in Brazil the dynamics of corruption scandals transformed the legal complex. With “affaires” of corruption, French, Spanish and Italian judges became protagonists in the public arena. Sometimes against their will, these members of the Judiciary engaged in anti-corruption become “symbols of a tumultuous revolution in the more or less Jacobin conceptions of the Republic and the evolution of a democracy of opinion orchestrated by the media” (Pujas, 2000). Studying the rise of Western liberalism from the 18th to the twentieth century, Karpik and Halliday (2011) had predicted a contest between a “political” strand that emphasizes local democratic practice, and an “economic” strand that emphasizes market transactions, noting that the latter leads. We can, for now, say that the anti-corruption complex in Brazil is also an example of this trend of rising liberal economic thinking. Mapping which cultural repertoires are activated by the group when explaining other action problems, like what logics are at work inside economic organizations, and comparing these results with the findings here is a first step to advance this research agenda. The content of the group’s thinking remains to be investigated in more detail and the undemocratic consequences of their behaviors further problematized to avoid harm in the future.