Honduran elections are vulnerable to corruption claims

Significance The initial candidate selection has sparked concerns about the extent of corruption within the political system, with some candidates having been accused of corrupt activity and one convicted of money laundering. The legislature has still not approved a long-awaited electoral law, raising the prospect of a contentious election. Impacts Parties selecting presidential candidates linked to corruption allegations could attract international criticism. Washington is likely to be wary of Yani Rosenthal, who has served a prison sentence in the United States. The legislative agenda will slow in 2021 as political attention focuses on the elections. A vocally anti-corruption candidate is yet to emerge but could do well in a field of candidates suspected of wrongdoing.

Does E-Procurement Prevent Corrupt Activity in Public Procurement Process?

Corruption is an extraordinary crime that occurred in every country. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in 2013 that about 10-25 percent of the value of public procurement in the whole world, including Indonesia, was corrupted. Based on the data of Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), corruption cases in public procurement is in the highest rank compared to the others. Using a game theoretical approach, this study aims to analyze the procurement process of public goods and services of the Indonesian Government, which has adopted the electronic system, called e-procurement. The game is played sequentially by two representative agents, namely the organizer (government) and the provider. It is assumed that the organizer has a non-corrupt nature. This study results that e-procurement is not significantly able to reduce corrupt behavior. It happens because, although the procurement process is conducted electronically, both sides still have the possibility to meet for negotiation, which can lead to corruption. Therefore, the key to preventing corrupt practices in public procurement is to avoid the two players’ meeting.

Plausible deniability

One explanation for why voters sometimes fail to hold elected officials accountable for corruption is failure to correctly attribute blame. Yet existing theories of how voters attribute responsibility do not consider how voters assessments may be shaped by the possibility that politicians can strategically delegate corrupt activity. This paper develops a formal model of an electoral accountability environment where politicians can pursue malfeasance directly or indirectly, but where ‘rogue agents’ occasionally pursue malfeasance independently. Corruption can arise via multiple pathways, and politicians sometimes possess plausible deniability. In one equilibrium, voters rationally reelect after plausibly deniable corruption due to a non-obvious and novel mechanism. Politicians are also more likely to delegate malfeasance to agents when they anticipate lenience. Voter lenience is non-monotonically related to many parameters, including politician competence, the agent’s malfeasance preferences, and transparency.

The Civic Duty to Report Crime and Corruption

Is the civic duty to report crime and corruption a genuine moral duty? After clarifying the nature of the duty, I consider a couple of negative answers to the question, and turn to an attractive and commonly held view, according to which this civic duty is a genuine moral duty. On this view, crime and corruption threaten political stability, and citizens have a moral duty to report crime and corruption to the government in order to help the government’s law enforcement efforts. The resulting duty is triply general in that it applies to everyone, everywhere, and covers all criminal and corrupt activity. In this paper, I challenge the general scope of this argument. I argue that that the civic duty to report crime and corruption to the authorities is much narrower than the government claims and people might think, for it only arises when the state (i) condemns genuine wrongdoing and serious ethical offenses as “crime” and “corruption,” and (ii) constitutes a dependable “disclosure recipient,” showing the will and power to hold wrongdoers accountable. I further defend a robust duty to directly report to the public—one that is weightier and wider than people usually assume. When condition (ii) fails to obtain, I submit, citizens are released of the duty to report crime and corruption to the authorities, but are bound to report to the public, even when the denunciation targets the government and is risky or illegal.