Fighting corruption in a time of crisis: Lessons from a radical regulatory shift experience

Reeves-Latour, Maxime; Morselli, Carlo

doi:10.1007/s10611-017-9741-z

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The Unité Permanente Anticorruption 1 (UPAC) provides a purposive selection of an intrinsic case for two reasons [49]. Firstly, as Reeves-Latour and Morselli [44] explain, Quebec's anticorruption experience constitutes an exceptional and illustrative regulatory shift. A plethora of new institutions have been implemented since 2009, making the case of Quebec empirically data-rich to study bureaucratic processes.…”

Section: Narrative Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During this time, media investigations and governmental watchdog reports led to a widely broadcasted commission of inquiry (aka the Charbonneau Inquiry), which revealed extensive collusive and corrupt systems capturing public works contracts in the construction industry [10,22]. Responding to the crisis, the provincial government engaged on an anti-corruption policy 'regulatory shift' [44]: a wide array of laws was implemented, and multiple repressive and preventive agencies were instituted at various governmental levels. Spearheading these new institutions, the Government of Quebec established in 2011 the Unité Permanente Anticorruption (UPAC), responsible of implementing the newly adopted anti-corruption law [36].…”

Section: A Decade Of Fighting Corruptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Bautista‐Beauchesne

2021

Crime Law Soc Change

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The widespread implementation of anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) has been an important public administration trend of the past decades. Considering the multifaceted challenges they face, much attention has been afforded to the legal structures which condition their bureaucratic autonomy. Little is known, however, about the reputational dimension of the autonomy of ACAs. This paper contributes a theoretical bridge between bureaucratic reputation theory and the anti-corruption literature, by studying how these agencies construct and manage their reputations over time. Using a mixedmethods research design, this paper employs a narrative analysis of commission hearings and semi-structured interviews, paired with quantitative content analysis of media articles and agency web-communications. The case of Quebec's (Canada) ACA shows the inherent challenges, strategies and non-linearity of reputation building, which enriches our understanding of the difficulty of crafting an agency's de facto bureaucratic autonomy.

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Section: Narrative Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Decade Of Fighting Corruptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Bautista‐Beauchesne

2021

Crime Law Soc Change

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“…However, although collusion between firms was the main focus of this article, both the Montréal and the Dutch case also revealed collusion between construction firms and governmental agencies, both local and federal (cf. Reeves-Latour and Morselli 2016;Van den Heuvel 2005). The role of the state when it comes to collusion in the construction industry cannot to be underestimated.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Business cartels and organised crime: exclusive and inclusive systems of collusion

Jaspers

2018

Trends Organ Crim

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In this article, two case studies of large-scale bid rigging in the construction industry in Canada and the Netherlands are analysed to explore why business cartels sometimes do and sometimes do not involve organised crime. By combining concepts from both organised crime and organisational crime, an integrated understanding of the organisation of serious crimes for gain is applied. Across time and space, businesses in the construction industry are known to fix prices, use collusive tendering and divide market shares in illegal cartel agreements. In order to stabilise cartels, participants need to ward off new competitors and prevent cheating within the cartel. The question why we see a system of collusion involving organised crime and violence in Canada as opposed to the Netherlands is answered through analysing two comparable cases. This article finds two systems of bid rigging emerge under different cultural conditions: inclusive and exclusive collusion. The exclusive system makes use of the violent reputation provided by criminal groups and distinguishes from the inclusive system that uses sophisticated administration of mutual claims in shadow bookkeeping.

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“…To illustrate this, the UPAC remains the sole guard dog agency to wield police-type powers. However, criminal corruption investigations and judicial proceedings are notoriously complex, procedurally long, have a high litigation rate, and necessitate a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt (Reeves-Latour & Morselli 2018). By contrast, the other "watchdog" ACAs, the BIG, the BIPA (municipal procurement), and the AMP (provincial procurement), function primarily with verification and inspection powers.…”

Section: Anti-corruption Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dubbed the Charbonneau Commission after its chief justice, the widely mediatized commission systematically exposed corruption and collusion schemes in the procurement of construction contracts mainly implicating municipal parties, public servants and the mafia (CEIC 2015). Reacting to the scandals, successive governments have implemented a “regulatory shift” by adopting a wide range of anti‐corruption policies (Reeves‐Latour & Morselli 2018). Over the last decade, this has produced a system of agencies and regulators which, either directly or indirectly, participate in repressing or preventing corruption and other white‐collar crimes throughout the province.…”

Section: Inter‐agency Collaboration and Reputation Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building anti‐corruption agency collaboration and reputation: Hanging together or separately hanged

Bautista‐Beauchesne

2021

Regulation & Governance

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The implementation of preventive anti‐corruption agencies (ACAs) has been a significant public administration regulatory trend of the last two decades. This article endeavors to better understand how preventive ACAs build inter‐agency collaboration and legitimacy. Rather than analyzing ACAs in isolation, this article proposes a novel understanding of autonomy‐building by accounting for the underlying reputational dimension of their broader collaborative environment: ACAs need to strike a delicate equilibrium between defending their organizational uniqueness and effectively collaborating to tackle the complexity of corruption. To achieve this, the article employs a mixed‐methods multiple case study of four preventive ACAs in Quebec (Canada) over the last decade.

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Fighting corruption in a time of crisis: Lessons from a radical regulatory shift experience

Cited by 4 publications

References 25 publications

Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Business cartels and organised crime: exclusive and inclusive systems of collusion

Building anti‐corruption agency collaboration and reputation: Hanging together or separately hanged

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