Overcoming democratic setbacks with public policies: strategies for anti-corruption in Mexico and public security in Brazil

Abstract

The recent history of the Latin American democracies has not implied in deep actions to mitigate certain phenomena such as corruption and criminality. Furthermore, these problems compromise the quality of democracy as they are also related to political institutions’ social impact and good governance. Thus, the article questions the overall characteristics that produced internal setbacks or failures to counterbalance corruption and crime in a public policy perspective. It also answers to what extent these same policies can be shaped to overcome failures and to improve social impacts. As the paper adopts a descriptive-generative logic, the first part exposes an overview of the indicators of corruption in Mexico and criminality in Brazil. The second part depicts the main patterns regarding anti-corruption programs and public security plans in both countries. The third part formulates two strategies: a sequential rooted model and the virtues of networking beyond the same public policies issues. The conclusions express that these strategies can mitigate corruption and criminality representing an opportunity to be considered by policy-makers to overcome democratic setbacks.