When corruption is not a crime: ‘innocent’ white politicians and the racialisation of criminality in Brazil
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In northeastern Brazil, a small number of political families have ruthlessly clung to power for centuries. Members of these seigniorial clans have grown accustomed to the benefits of public office and, therefore, do not recognise how the economically and politically corrupt acts they have practised during their careers might be construed as illegal. Instead, they blame corruption on desperately poor voters whom, they argue, subvert the democratic process by selling their votes to the highest bidder on Election Day. Rather than examine why the desperately poor sell their votes, as scholarly literature on corruption in Latin America often does, this essay seeks to understand the racialised and classed discourses elite white politicians develop and disseminate in order to justify – or to deny – their own participation in corruption. Comparing scandals involving Fernando Collor and Lula, respectively, the essay suggests that historical and contemporary intersections of race and class become visible whenever allegations of corruption are made in Brazil, and in the Americas more broadly. The essay further argues that when elite politicians accuse those from humbler backgrounds of corruption, their accusations work to shore up an elite consensus that associates innocence with wealth and whiteness, and criminality with poverty and blackness.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it