Brazil is a global leader in transparency and in controlling corruption.

By Luiza Calegari, Conjur - Brazil is one of the countries that best controls corruption in the world. In the overall ranking, it is ahead of Belgium, Chile, and Israel, and, according to some criteria, ahead of Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. Brazil is a global leader when it comes to transparency and integrity in public administration. No, this is not a delusion. The news was reported by... website Jot, produced by economist Fernando Teixeira, specialist in Corporate Compliance (HEC Lausanne) and Business Ethics (Pennsylvania Law School).

This is the conclusion of the "Corruption Risk Forecast" index, created in 2015 by Romanian professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, in a program funded by the European Union and other entities. The system measures the drama of corruption using objective criteria of state organization, such as access to information, budgetary transparency, e-government, and procurement models.

In terms of budget transparency and e-government, Brazil is close to the top ten, and in administrative transparency it achieves an incredible 2nd place among 119 countries, scoring 8,88 out of 10 points. In the overall ranking of public integrity, Brazil is in 34th place, and in transparency, 30th place.

The results of the Corruption Risk Prediction Index expose and contrast with the "Corruption Perceptions Index" (CPI), published by "Transparency International"—an entity that has been held accountable for corrupt practices. The index presented by the "NGO" was allegedly collected from "twelve" anonymous sources and financed by equally anonymous collaborators. It is unknown who consulted these "sources" or how they were consulted.

The result of the Corruption Perceptions Index is practically the opposite of what was obtained by the "Corruption Risk Prediction". It places Brazil in 104th position among 180 countries, scoring 36 points on a scale up to 100 points. Until 2014, Brazil was 35 positions and seven points better than it is today.

The index, manufactured by "Transparency" (a foreign company), which attempted to seize the money from fines imposed in leniency agreements (therefore, Brazilian public funds), suggests that the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Judiciary of the country are complicit in the crime—a context incompatible with a scenario in which hundreds of businessmen and politicians were lynched in public squares.

It is ironic that—at a time when the country is fighting alleged corruption the most—a company disguised as an NGO, entangled with prosecutors and judges who used legal processes to serve their personal interests, accuses Brazil of friendly complicity with crime. Even more ironic is that an entity that calls itself "transparency" is so opaque about its modus operandi.

It is obvious that, for a community guided more by emotion than reason, news of the fight against corruption causes the "perception" of this evil to increase. Using this feeling to say that the evil being attacked has grown is not only intellectually dishonest. It is fraud—a crime for which businessman Bruno Brandão, head of "transparency," who makes a living from it, can now be charged.

The second survey, the "Corruption Risk Prediction" (see the study's criteria and methodology here), is also based on opinion polls. And it is precisely these polls that drag Brazil down. Aspects such as judicial independence and freedom of the press are poorly evaluated. Were it not for opinion polls, Brazil would be at the top of the global ranking for corruption control.

"In statistics, a discrepancy between two indicators is a bad sign. Either one of them is wrong, or both are," says the Jota article. Either Brazil has sham institutions that don't function, or it has a biased and distorted public opinion. Or both.

Fernando Teixeira's text points out that studies in mass communication show that public opinion can be distorted and biased in some cases. Research also shows that public opinion tends to interfere with the functioning of institutions, which reinforces the problem.

One of the main theories of communication is the "spiral of silence," created by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The idea is that people tend to imitate the opinions of others, even when they disagree, for fear of isolation. Mass media, including social networks, are machines for producing "spirals of silence."

Research in communication shows that corruption was a relatively insignificant topic in the media and public opinion until the 1980s. It began to grow in the 1990s and reached its peak from 2014 onwards, when the "Operation Lava Jato" appeared in Brazil. In 2015, Brazil plummeted in the Corruption Perceptions Index: it fell five points and lost 16 positions from one year to the next.

Since the 1988 Federal Constitution, Brazil has been establishing robust internal and external control mechanisms for public administration. These include audit courts, comptroller's offices, the Public Prosecutor's Office, and the Judiciary. Brazil is at the forefront of e-government, has vast amounts of information available to the public, and a wide range of instruments for intervening in government decisions.

The prosecution of a corruption scandal is an indication that the problem is being solved, not that it is getting worse. But public opinion perceives exactly the opposite. From there, a feedback loop between public opinion and institutions kicks in, exacerbating the misunderstanding.

The interference between public opinion and institutions is a recurring theme in research. One example is the doctoral thesis of Professor José Roberto Franco Xavier from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). It was published in 2015 in an article entitled "Public Opinion and the Criminal Law System".

The conclusion is that the justice system possesses a specific legal tool for incorporating public opinion: "reception structures." Reception structures are vague legal concepts used to give the appearance of legality to popular outcry. Concepts such as "preservation of public order," "high culpability," and "aggravating circumstances of the crime" are some examples of reception structures.

Public opinion pays little attention to concepts such as "full defense" and "due process of law" and views the Judiciary with distrust when it fails to deliver what is expected, which tends to leave institutional agents anxious. The result is large-scale punitive spectacles that reinforce the impression that there is a serious problem where a solution is already underway.

The discrepancy between Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Corruption Risk Forecast index reflects the difference between appearance and substance. In the last decade, Brazil has been engulfed by punitive measures that have not helped control corruption. In 2013, Brazil's outlook in the Corruption Risk Forecast index showed improvement. Since then, the country has stagnated.