Some things are more important than corruption

In the anti-corruption community, it is fairly common to puzzle over—and bemoan—the fact that voters in many democracies seem to support candidates that are known or reputed to be corrupt. “Why,” we often ask, “do voters often elect or re-elect corrupt politicians, even though voters claim to despise corruption?”

One of the common answers that we give to this question (an answer supported by some empirical research) is that even though voters dislike corruption, they care more about other things, and are often willing to overlook serious allegations of impropriety if a candidate or party is attractive for other reasons. We often make this observation ruefully, sometimes accompanied with the explicit or implicit wish that voters would make anticorruption a higher priority when casting their votes.

We should be careful what we wish for.

I had that thought about a week ago during an exchange with a Brazilian acquaintance about this month’s elections. This acquaintance—a bright young graduate student and researcher at a leading Brazilian university—was bemoaning the fact that she didn’t like any of the candidates in the election, which is something I’ve heard from lots of Brazilian friends (or for that matter lots of friends in many democracies these days, including the U.S.—complaining about the lack of attractive choices seems fairly commonplace). But then she said something that brought me up short: She said that although she didn’t like any of the options, she planned to vote for Jair Bolsonaro.

For those who don’t follow Brazilian politics, Bolsonaro is a far-right, quasi-fascist figure who his best known for his homophobia, sexism, racism, violent rhetoric, hostility to refugees, support of torture and capital punishment, and sympathy/admiration for the Brazilian military dictatorship that ruled the country before the transition...