Since the late 1980s, when it transitioned to democracy, Brazil has had its share of highly publicized corruption scandals. Then in 2014, it saw a massive corruption scheme make headlines all over the media: Petrobrás, the state-run oil company lost over US$2 billion just in bribes in a money-laundering scheme involving executives and politicians. Most large parties have been linked to the so-called “Petrolão” scandal, which has been considered the biggest scheme in Brazil since the late 1980s. Does that actually mean that corruption has increased in the last decades? This presentation will examine past and current events of Brazilian politics to address why corruption seems to be getting worse – and why, ironically, that is actually a reason to be optimistic about democracy in Brazil.

Mariana Hipólito R. Mota is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Calgary. In Brazil, she obtained a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE). In November 2016, Mariana defended her Ph.D. dissertation, which is titled “From Delegation to Limits on Presidential Power: Brazil in Comparative Perspective” and examines the creation of limits to presidential power in weakly institutionalized democracies through the case of Brazil. In 2014, she was at Universidade de Brasília (UnB) for a four-month research stay to do archival research for her dissertation and conduct interviews with policy makers, NGO leaders, and bureaucrats. She is especially interested in comparative politics, processes of democratization, Latin American politics (with an emphasis on Brazilian politics), and topics concerning the relationship between democracy and corruption.