corruption

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The discursive use of the concept of ‘corruption’ in parliamentary debates during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1935–74) Luís De Sousa and Marcelo Moriconi Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 45 / Issue 02 / July 2015, pp 159 - 181 DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2015.8, Published online: 17 June 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0048840215000088 How to cite this article: Luís De Sousa and Marcelo Moriconi (2015). The discursive use of the concept of ‘corruption’ in parliamentary debates during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1935–74). Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 45, pp 159-181 doi:10.1017/ipo.2015.8 Request Permissions : Click here

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Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica (2015), 45:2, 159–181 © Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2015 doi:10.1017/ipo.2015.8 First published online 17 June 2015

The discursive use of the concept of ‘corruption’ in parliamentary debates during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1935–74) LUÍS DE SOUSA

1

* AND

MARCELO MORICONI

2

1 Unidade de Investigação em Governança, Competitividade e Políticas Públicas (GOVCOPP), University of Aveiro (UA), Aveiro, Portugal 2 Centro de Investigações e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-IUL), Lisbon Unversity Institute (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal

Corruption is deviant behaviour from legal and social norms, observable in both dictatorships and democracies, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind. Studying corruption in dictatorships is particularly challenging due to the fact that freedom of expression is censored and there is little (if any) reliable information about the enforcement of legal provisions. This article provides a contribution to the growing literature on the role of legislatures in dictatorships by focusing on parliamentary debates on corruption as a discourse control mechanism. The case of the Portuguese legislature during the Estado Novo is paradigmatic in that regard. The National Assembly, as it will be demonstrated in this article, was able to shift the debate on corruption from the legal to the moral dimension and, thus, deprive citizens, and in particular the opposition, of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable for their misconduct. Keywords: corruption; authoritarianism; legislatures; parliamentary debates; morality; Estado Novo

Introduction Corruption is a phenomenon observable in both dictatorships and democracies, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind (Alatas, 1990: 3–4). However, its understanding is not similar across regimes. Indeed, corruption can be defined as the abuse of public office for private gain, but it can also be understood as any serious violation of the standards and expectations associated with public office, regardless of whether such behaviour or practice implies or not a breach of law or of codes of conduct (Friedrich, 1966; Gardiner, 1992; Jos, 1993; Johnston, 1996; De Sousa, 2008). This discrepancy between legal/formal and social/cultural standards defining corrupt behaviour in a given society at a particular time is what makes the study of corruption so challenging (De Sousa, 2002). * E-mail: [email protected]

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LUÍS DE SOUSA AND MARCELO MORICONI

Moreover, addressing this conceptual complexity in dictatorships is more difficult than in democracies. Although the maxim, ‘not everything that is legal is approved ethically by citizens’ may still apply, citizens in dictatorships do not voice it out in the open, in particular when it concerns misconduct by regime officials. This poses additional difficulties to the researcher: how can corruption be studied in a context of limited and unreliable information? Even if records on criminal laws, penal codes, and other legal provisions are likely to be accessible, there is barely any information about its enforcement and when it exists it is likely to be biased. When it comes to social/cultural norms, the situation is even more stringent. If corruption is a deviant social conduct that raises moral condemnation in society, the immediate question is: who dictates what those moral standards are? (Scott, 1972). In a democracy, we can try to understand what those moral standards are by looking at people’s perceptions, attitudes, and practices. This can be done by resorting to the usual opinion-based research techniques, such as survey methods, discussion groups, or content analysis of corruption news. Although in a dictatorship, these sources of information are neither readily available nor do they offer reliable indicators of people’s perceptions due to the fact that freedom of expression, media independence, and parliamentary politics are conditioned by militarist rule, censorship, regime propaganda, etc., they can, nevertheless, be taken as predictors of the regime’s sensitivity to and understanding of the phenomenon and as a discourse control mechanism. In this line, we have opted to do a content analysis of parliamentary debates during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1935–74) in order to assess the role of National Assembly in steering public discourse and perception of corruption. This is a new approach to the study of corruption in electoral authoritarian regimes. According to our findings, the Portuguese authoritarian regime has used the controlled parliament in an instrumental manner, along with other conventional propaganda mechanisms, to shape the public discourse on corruption by shifting its focus from the legal to the moral dimension of the phenomenon. This move had two important consequences: first, it served to hide eventual involvements in corruption interactions by regime officers; second, it deprived citizens and oppositions of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable. Why have the authors chosen the Portuguese case? The case of Portugal results is quite unique for three main reasons: it was the longest-lived authoritarian regime in Western Europe; it maintained a parliamentary institution; and it was characterized by strong charismatic rule based on an officially constructed sense of moral rectitude. Morality played a central role in the regime imaginary. The image of austerity purported by a strong catholic rejection of material wealth moulded by the charismatic leadership of Salazar was so intense and widely shared among the population that it still has considerable impact upon today’s perceptions on regime corruption. Despite the authoritarianism of the Estado Novo (monopoly of power, discretion under a legal façade, media censorship, and persecution of political opponents and dissidents), the Portuguese historical narratives have systematically described Salazar as an austere and

The discursive use of the concept of ‘corruption’ 161

honest leader, worried about the people, defending of traditional values and with public service devotion. To an extent, this explains why there are very few academic works addressing the issue of corruption during the Estado Novo and why it is so challenging to try to understand the way the regime has handled this sensitive issue. This article is organized into four parts: the first, discusses the role of legislatures in electoral authoritarian regimes; the second, addresses two regime conceptualizations of corruption – corruption as abuse of office and moral corruption; the third, looks into parliamentary sources to try to understand how the regime treated the theme of corruption and what were the discrepancies between these two conceptualizations of corruption; the final part, makes some general remarks on the official talk of corruption.

The role of legislatures in electoral authoritarian regimes: the Estado Novo’s concept of ‘organic democracy’ Following the seminal works of Schmitter (1977) and Linz (1979), the literature on authoritarian regimes in which at least one political institution, the legislature, is chosen through a restricted electoral process has grown considerably during the past decade (Folch, 2003; Levitsky and Way, 2003; Brownlee, 2004; Gandhi and Przeworski, 2006; Lust-Okar, 2006; Magaloni, 2006; Boix and Svolik, 2007; Gandhi, 2008). However, most publications tend to focus more on dictatorial single parties than on legislatures, in part due to the fact that ‘party systems in dictatorships exhibit much more variation across regions than legislatures’ (Gandhi, 2008: 38). Historical research on the role of the National Assembly in the Portuguese authoritarian regime is also sizeable (Quintas, 1996; Braga da Cruz, 1999; Castilho, 2001; de Carvalho, 2002; Fernandes, 2005; Ferreira, 2009; Pinto, 2011), but none of these contributions have addressed the issue of corruption in particular. Authoritarian regimes differ in their choice of institutional means for rulemaking and information gathering. Here, we have to start by distinguishing between short-lived tyrannical dictatorships and long-duration authoritarian regimes with a certain degree of support from segments of the population, where discretionary rule takes place under a legal façade and intimidation is more subtle, relying on a widespread state information apparatus that co-opts civilian informants. The Argentine, Chilean, and Greek dictatorships abolished their legislatures, whereas the Portuguese, Brazilian, and Mexican ones retained them under more restricted terms and conditions. In the case of Portugal, the regime’s decision to adopt an ‘organic-statist’ legislature has more to do with a general tendency of interwar dictatorships than a product of specific patterns of institutional development (Pinto, 2012). ‘Parliamentary dictatorships’ or ‘electoral authoritarian regimes’ employ ‘consultative procedures, legislative assemblies, and party organizations to shape the new rules for governing; in general, the greater the resort to these procedures, the more politically effective the authoritarian regime was and the lower was its resort to police or military repression’ (Domínguez, 2002). As Gandhi noticed, legislatures

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in dictatorships are not mere shams, but the product of strategic behaviour on the part of political actors’ (2008: 180). They serve as a forum in which the regime can announce their policy preferences, co-opt large segments of society, and engage in an institutionalized dialogue (or controlled bargaining) with the more visible sectors of the opposition (Gandhi, 2008: 34–36, 80–81). Autocrats too ‘need compliance and cooperation’ (Gandhi, 2008: xviii), hence other than serving as a means through which ‘authoritarian leaders can offer policy and material concessions’ (Gandhi, 2008: 166) in order to lower political contestation to its rule, legislatures under dictatorships also play a crucial role in framing and promoting the regime’s normative cohesiveness. This was the case with the Portuguese Estado Novo (1926–74). As Castilho (2007: 291) explained, despite Salazar’s misbelief in the parliamentary institution, he maintained the National Assembly until the end of his tenure, because it was useful for propaganda purposes, both at home and abroad. On the other hand, he had nothing to fear as MPs rather than being elected were ‘appointed’ by himself or under his supervision: only 15% of MPs during the dictatorship had no direct links to the governing bodies of the regime’s political organizations. The Portuguese authoritarian regime came to being in a context of civil strife and political instability. In its early days, the regime had to deal with several power groups and currents of opinion. The parliament was abolished with the military coup of 28 May 1926 and only reinitiated its activity 2 years after the adoption of the 1933 Constitution. The Portuguese Estado Novo adopted the concept of democracia orgânica (organic democracy) as a legitimization tool. Its institutional format contemplated the exercise of discretionary rule under a legal façade, the existence of powerless organic legislatures, the holding of elections, and, for part of its duration, a regime party and the Constitution of an opposition front (under tight state police control). These co-option techniques ensured a great degree of regime cohesiveness under a charismatic leadership and strong popular support by large segments of the population. However, we should not mistake popularity for democratic consent. The Estado Novo was in all its plenitude an authoritarian regime, hence it was prepared to repress, and of course, and at times did so. The Estado Novo decided to reintroduce a legislative body, with limited powers and capacities, to advance its goals: the Assembleia Nacional (henceforth National Assembly) (Article 71 of the 1933 Constitution). The National Assembly was a monocameral parliament composed of 90 deputies in the first legislature and 150 in the last one that ended abruptly with the 25 April Revolution. The deputies were elected by direct majority suffrage. Although the Estado Novo used electoral consultations on a regular basis, these were not free, fair, and universal. Only 12% of the population voted in these elections and there were no mechanisms to control for electoral fraud (de Carvalho, 2002: 10). According to the corporatist Constitution, the National Assembly was a sovereign body, with exclusive1 and shared legislative 1 Its formal exclusive legislative competences included the organization of the National Defence, the creation or elimination of public services, the establishment of the currency and its value, the definition of the system of weights and measures, and the organization of the court system.


powers and oversight of public expenditure. In practice, however, its legislative powers were reduced to symbolic interventions on a restricted number of policy areas availed by the Government. In that sense, it was not a parliament as such, but a talking shop for regime supporters and at a later stage for some (loyal) opposition members, such as the Ala Liberal (Liberal Wing) (Fernandes, 2005: 18–25). Only on rare occasions were the interventions in the organic legislature used to voice some discontent from within the regime regarding sensitive policy options, such as the colonial war or the promiscuity between public and private issues. As Juan Linz simply put it, ‘no legislature in an authoritarian regime has either the formal or de facto power to question the ultimate authority of a ruler or ruling group’ (1979: 95). Neither the National Assembly, nor the Corporatist Chamber2 to that regard, played a major role in decisionmaking, but when it came to certain sensitive policy or social issues, it had an ultimate normative function: (1) to set the tone about how certain potentially disruptive issues, such as corruption, should be addressed or simply omitted from the public agenda (Article 85–105 of the 1933 Constitution); and (2) to issue ideological appeals about the rectitude of the regime and its moral superiority. The National Assembly, as it will be demonstrated in this article, was able to shift the debate on corruption from the legal to the moral dimension and thus deprive citizens, and in particular the opposition, of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable for their misconduct. In a dictatorship, official talk about corruption is meant to have a legitimization effect either by bashing predecessors in an arbitrary and prosecutorial manner (clean up act) or by moulding the way the man of the street talks about corruption (power of manipulation). As Lukes put it, this is the most insidious exercise of power, i.e. the capacity ‘to prevent people to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial’ (1974: 24). Whereas in democracies, parliamentary debates are likely to mirror, to a greater or lesser extent, the major issues of concern in society, in electoral authoritarian regimes they serve as a discursive control mechanism. The focus of the information moves from the masses to a specific segment of the elite entrusted with parliamentary functions. Notwithstanding, parliamentary debates are unrepresentative of the nature and extent of corruption during the Estado Novo – by the simple fact that such information would discredit its cohesiveness and threaten its rule – it is, nevertheless, useful to try and understand what type of ‘corruption talk’ the regime wanted to be voiced to the public, when and in what terms. For that reason, instead of taking parliamentary debates at their face value and dismissing tout court their 2 In addition to this parliamentary chamber, the 1933 Constitution also created a second parliamentary body, the Corporatist Chamber (Article 102), whose composition consisted of representatives from the local authorities, prosecutors, and members of the various professional guilds or corporations.

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usefulness to understand social representations of corruption, we have opted to survey their contents to understand the elite’s approach to potentially disruptive issues in society.

Two regime conceptualizations of corruption The 1933 corporatist Constitution introduced two conceptualizations of corruption: one based on legal/formal standards associated with the exercise of public duties, which took form through the penal code and other criminal laws (corruption as abuse of office); and another based on subjective/moral standards associated with social conduct and habits in general (moral corruption) (see Table 1). Both conceptualizations were anchored in the Constitution and had legal backing. However, it is worth noticing that the definition and discursive importance of corruption as abuse of office had a more restricted scope in the 1933 corporatist Constitution than under the 1911 Republican Constitution. As it happened during the First Republic, the Estado Novo Constitution equated good performance of political and administrative institutions with honesty and public integrity. Both constitutional texts provided a definition for abuse of office applicable to public and elective officials. Acting against the probity of the public administration was considered a serious offence under Article 114/6 of the 1933 National Constitution and Article 55/5 of the 1911 Republican Constitution. Similarly, the misuse of public funds was also considered an offence against the public interest under Article 114/7 of the 1933 National Constitution and Article Table 1. Anti-corruption (AC) provisions in the Republican and corporatist Constitutions

AC provisions

1911 Constitution

Rules of incompatibility for Articles 20, 21, political offices 50, and 61

1933 Constitution

Amendments

Articles 25, 90, and 109

Article 90 reviewed (1937 Constitutional Reform: Law No. 1963, of 18 December) Article 40 (1951 Constitutional Reform: Law No. 2048, of 11 June) New Article 31 (1959 Constitutional Reform: Law No. 2100, of 29 August)

State protection against moral corruption

–

Articles 6, 13, and 43

Crimes of abuse of office and lack of probity applicable to public and political officials Regulation of public duties Corporate responsibility

Articles 55, 71, 72, and 85

Article 114

Articles 22 and 23 Article 59 (1971 Constitutional Reform: Law No. 3/71, of 16 August)


55/7 of the 1911 Republican Constitution. However, the constitutional emphasis on the need to build a transparent administration was not the same. Whereas the 1911 Constitution clarified that the crimes of abuse of office would be defined by specific legislation (Article 72) and indicated that the First Congress of the Republic should prepare a series of draft bills on crimes of political responsibility and on incompatibilities and impediments to embody this constitutional principle (Article 85); the 1933 Constitution did not have any article specifically addressing the urgent need to create the necessary legislative/regulatory mechanisms to fight abuse of office by senior public officials and political appointees. Regarding the regulation of public duties, articles 22 and 23 of the 1933 National Constitution established that public officials – including those in local Governments, administrative corporations, or state-owned enterprises – are serving the collective interest and not private ones. Whereas in the 1911 Republican Constitution, incompatibilities and impediments were mentioned in the Constitution, but were to be regulated in detail through dedicated laws; under the 1933 National Constitution, incompatibilities and impediments were addressed only in the Constitution (Article 25 set incompatibilities for public servants, article 90 for members of the National Assembly, and article 109 for Ministers). These incompatibilities prohibited the accumulation of public employment and the possibility of public and elective officials from entering into contracts with the Government. In 1937, the impediments set under article 90 were extended to include business relations with state-owned enterprises (Article 90, Reform: Law No. 1963, of 18 December 1937). The accumulation of positions in public companies was considered contrary to the public moral and the proper functioning of the economy (Article 40, Reform 1951). The explicit concern about moral corruption was an innovation under the 1933 National Constitution, which provided that ‘the State must promote the moral unity of the people’ (Article 6). In fact, for the first time in the constitutional history of Portugal, the word corruption is mentioned in a constitutional article, but with an arbitrary meaning: the number 5 of article 13 established that ‘in order to defend the family, the State and local authorities must take all the necessary measures to avoid the corruption of traditions’. In addition, the number 3 of article 43 of the 1933 Constitution provided that public schools should improve the intellectual capacity of individuals, mould their character, and teach them professional values and civic and moral virtues. The reform introduced by Law 1910 of 23 May 1935 clarified that ‘the moral and civic virtues’ were ‘oriented by the principles of Christian doctrine and the moral traditions of the Country’. These two constitutional provisions were at the heart of the regime-led moralization of public and private spheres in view of the creation of ‘a new State, a new society and a new man’. When economic speculation became a political issue at the end of the 1950s, the provisions of article 31 of the 1933 National Constitution, which defined the rights and obligations of the State to regulate economic and social life, were broadened to include ‘the duty to prevent excessive profits that deviate capital from its human and

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Christian purposes’ (Modification of Article 31: Article 5 of Law 2100, of 29 August 1959). The regime focused much of its attention on state protection against corruption defined as moral decay and immoral corporate practice.3 In other words, the State was not perceived by the regime as immoral or corrupt; greedy individuals, businesses, and the society as a whole were. The fact that this conceptualization of moral corruption was anchored in the Constitution would influence the way debates about the phenomenon were framed in the National Assembly. The regime wanted not only to regulate conducts in the exercise of public duties, but it also wanted to impose a State definition of morality to private conducts.

A content analysis of parliamentary debates in authoritarian legislatures We have assessed the use of corruption as a discursive label during the parliamentary debates of the Portuguese Estado Novo. The citations were collected through a keyword search of the online database of the Portuguese Parliament4 that contains all the Session Diaries of the four periods of parliamentary history: the Constitutional monarchy (1821–1910); the First Republic (1910–26); the Estado Novo (1935–74), and the Third Republic (since 1974). This digital archive has a tool to perform advanced searches for words or phrases. We searched for mentions of ‘corruption’ (corrupção), ‘to corrupt’ (corromper), and ‘corrupted’ (corrupto and corrupta) in the Session Diaries of the National Assembly (Assembleia Nacional) and in the Minutes of the Corporatist Chamber (Câmara Corporativa) for the 11 legislatures of the Estado Novo. We have also checked for the use of the terms ‘fraud’ (fraude) (413 mentions) and ‘bribes’ (suborno) (23 mentions) to see if there was some connection between both. We found no straightforward correlation. Most of the references on fraud are related to fiscal fraud (mostly tax evasion and flight of capital abroad in the last years of the regime) and consumers’ fraud (mostly adulterations of products and falsification). In neither situation, the term ‘fraud’ has been expressly related to corruption or bribery. Regarding bribes, when the word appeared in the debates it was mostly related to foreign corrupt practices in Zaire, England, France, or India. The term bribery has never been used to describe any practice or conduct identified in the Portuguese context. Table 2 shows the number of references found in the texts for the whole period of existence of the National Assembly and the Corporatist Chamber (1935–74). 3 In the midst of growing political contestation and social unrest, the Government decided to review the constitution in 1971 as an attempt to give a new impetus to a decaying regime. With the liberalization of the economy, speculation grew apace. The Government felt the need to act by regulating the conduct of economic agents. Articles 59 and 60 of the constitutional reform of 1971 (Law No. 3/71, of 16 August) redefined corporate responsibility and imposed upon economic agents the duty to safeguard the public interest at all times. 4 http://debates.parlamento.pt/search.aspx?cid=r2.dan


Table 2. The use of the term corruption in parliamentary debates during the Estado Novo Number of references of corruption (corrupção) I Legislature (1935–38) II Legislature (1938–42) III Legislature (1942–45) IV Legislature (1945–49) V Legislature (1949–53) VI Legislature (1953–57) VII Legislature (1957–61) VIII Legislature (1961–65) IX Legislature (1965–69) X Legislature (1969–73) XI Legislature (1973–74) Total

Number of MPs Number of sessions in which the who pronounced Total number of sessions per the term term ‘corrupção’ legislature ‘corrupção’ was pronounced

21

16

12

192

7

5

5

130

16

10

8

167

25

11

8

201

49

23

19

229

15

14

12

207

17

14

12

217

7

6

5

205

29

19

18

204

36

20

15

218

2

2

2

56

224

140

Total number of MPs per legislature 90

120

130

130 (1969–71) 150 (1971–73) 150

Each mention of ‘corruption’ (corrupção) was treated as a unit of analysis or statement to understand with what frequency and in what terms and context the regime’s parliamentary representatives referred to the term in their interventions or debates. We have analysed a total of 224 mentions of ‘corruption’ that were referred by different MPs during the 140 sessions. Although only a minority of MPs used the term in each legislature (