The knee jerk reaction against corruption is to centralize power: "X institutions are corrupt, we will give more power to this candidate who demonstrated to be a good person, so he will vanish those institutions and saves us fron corruption".
That's what Bolsonaro did in Brazil. In his campaign, he demonstrated to be a good christian and a person of faith. In Brazil, people strongly associate that with being a good person.
Guess what happened after.
Wasn't Bolsonaro elected because the previous president and his main opponent (Lula?) was so corrupt that he even landed in jail, which is a rare event for a prominent politician?
> Guess what happened after.
Care to explain to non Brazilians?
I couldn't understand why our news in Germany was pretending that a guy convinced of corruption would be a saviour of Brazil against the evil Bolsonaro.
That highlights one of the main problems in our societies. We just accept information served to us by our governments without much checking. Either because we don't care about every topic, or because we don't have a means to actually check.
Simplifying, it's like this: If the road to presidency is corrupt, you either become also corrupt (on a varying degree) or stay as one of those parties with no more than 1% of the votes. But then, there's a pact of silence between cronies. And those who are accused of corruption are the ones that either went too far or went against powerful people in the government.
I take all those trials with a grain of salt.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/09/13/us-treasury-department-torn...
Al the cases were dismissed because a new law was passed that created a new court and said every case like Lula's should be judged only on that new court.
There's not much to stop a crook being both officially well paid and totally corrupt.
A fish rots from the head down.
and
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
and
Nothing disinfects better than sun light.
IMHO they all apply when dealing with public servants in unchecked positions of power.
Is it true? Well, maybe. From Van Rijckeghem and Weder (2001):
> ... we find evidence of a statistically and economically significant relationship between relative wages and corruption.... While economically significant, the relationship, nevertheless, implies that a large increase in wages is required to eradicate corruption solely by raising wages... The relationship between wages and corruption is not found in regressions with country-fixed effects which points to ineffectual wage policy in the short run...
I haven't found much better evidence than that, though there is Di Tella & Schargrodsky (2004) with a detailed study on a hospital.
Well, assuming that all people are roughly the same as each other, the answer would be to adopt traditions and systems from countries that aren't corrupt. Attempt the sisyphean task of convincing people that giving power to the middle class is going to lead to a better future.
As your comment reveals, the instinct when confronted with corruption is ... centralise power and try to force it to be used for good. That doesn't work, so try to convince people to decentralise power. Political and bureaucratic elites are regularly revealed to be corrupt, so stop making them the bottleneck for handing out the "allowed to run a business!" stamp. Centralising power just gives corrupt people a target to aim for and increases the blast radius when they worm their way in to a position.
How you convince people to do the sensible thing and decentralise power is beyond me though. The instinct to push power to a single leader is remarkably strong in humans.