How social accountability fosters public integrity: the role of public policy councils in curbing corruption

Vieira, James Batista

doi:10.1590/1678-98732331e017

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Brasil

Revista de Sociologia e Política

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Artigo Original • Rev. Sociol. Polit. 31 • 2023 • https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-98732331e017 copy

How social accountability fosters public integrity: the role of public policy councils in curbing corruption

Como o controle social promove a integridade pública: o papel dos conselhos de política pública para conter a corrupção

Authorship SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

This article assesses the impact of social accountability, implemented through municipal public policy councils in the fields of health, education, and social assistance, on corruption.

Materials and methods:

The study adopts a quasi-experimental research design within a robust causal inference framework. A set of estimation techniques, such as regression, propensity score matching, and instrumental variables, is employed to establish a counterfactual for analyzing a random sample of 1,223 municipalities independently audited between 2006 and 2015 as part of the Municipal Oversight Program of the Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General.

Findings:

Statistically significant effects of social accountability, carried out through public policy councils, on corruption in Brazilian municipalities are observed. When these councils are operational and active, and effectively exercising their legally mandated roles, a statistically significant reduction in the occurrence of corruption cases is evident.

Discussion:

Findings align with the international literature, emphasizing the positive impact of social accountability in the fight against corruption. The proposed theoretical model elucidates how operational public policy councils, through monitoring, regulation, consultation, and decision-making on local programs, play a key role in promoting social accountability while overcoming the ‘social fence dilemma,' bolstering the necessary collective action for public integrity. However, corruption is a complex problem that demands a multifaceted approach, and further research is required to delve into strategies for optimizing the performance of public policy councils. The study contributes to a more evidence-based design of democratic anticorruption policies.

Keywords
corruption; public policy councils; social accountability; public integrity; public governance

		Decision-making
		strong	weak
Monitoring	strong	Policy councils	Social audits
Monitoring	weak	Participatory budgeting	Right to information

Legal basis	Attributions
Health Councils (CMS) Complementary Law nº 141/12 Law nº 8.890/90 Resolution CNS nº 453/2012 Resolution CNS nº 333/2003	1. participate in the formulation and oversight of the health policy, including its economic aspects, and propose strategies for its implementation; 2. establish criteria for financial and budgetary planning and execution of the Health Funds, besides monitoring its destination; 3. approve the annual health budget planning, considering the prior goals established in the law; 4. supervise all the expenditure and deliberate on criteria for the use of resources to health policy, including those transferred from other federative entities; 5. periodically review health policy plans; 6. analyze and decide on management reports; 7. supervise and monitor the activities on health services, receive complaints about them and send it to accountability bodies, in accordance with legislation
FUNDEB Councils Law nº 11.494/2007	1. prepare the FUNDEB annual budget plan; 2. obtain information about all financial transactions carried out with FUNDEB funds; 3. demand that the Teachers' Career Plan be drawn up and faithfully complied with; 4. meet regularly to evaluate the reports and statements prepared by the City Council on FUNDEB; 5. issue an opinion on the statements, which contain information relating to the use of FUNDEB, to be forwarded to the Court of Auditors; 6. request school managers and the Education Department to fully comply with the actions and deadlines planned by FUNDEB.
School Feeding Councils (CAE) Law n° 11.947/2009	1. monitor and supervise the use of resources destined to school meals and compliance with guidelines and objective of the PNAE; 2. ensure the quality of the food and the acceptability of the menus; 3. report any irregularities observed in the implementation of the program to the control bodies; 4. hold meetings, including specific ones, to assess the PNAE actives and results; 5. Develop an Annual Action Plan.
Municipal Social Assistance Councils (CMAS) Law nº 8.742/1993 Resolution CNAS nº 237/2006	1. decide on the municipal social assistance plan and reviews; 2. decide on the use of the municipal social assistance fund and monitor the annual budget and financial execution; 3. evaluate and monitor the results of the social assistance plan to ensure its effectiveness; 4. establish the criteria for providing benefits to citizens; 5. deliberate on the social assistance budget and the annual management report; 6. regulate the provision of public and private social assistance services; enroll and inspect social assistance entities; 7. receive complaints about the policy and forward them to accountability bodies, in accordance with legislation.

Algorithm	Corruption (mean)		t	df	p-value
Algorithm	control	treatment
Exact	control	treatment	13.8787	8.2584	6.264	578.64	0.001
Nearest	13.5843	4.7848	10.90	587.04	0.001

Model	Β coefficient	P-value
OLS	-4.604	0.01
Poisson	-0.433	0.01
Negative-binomial	-0.435	0.01
Zero-inflated	-0.396	0.01
Logistic	-5.007	0.01
Matching (exact)	-1.652	0.10
Matching (nearest)	-5.007	0.01
Instrumental variable	-15.046	0.05

Variables		Metric	Operationalization
Dependent	corruption	Counting of corruption	Total amount of serious failures (CGU, 2020CGU, Controladoria-Geral da União (2020) Programa de fiscalização em entes federativos. Available at: <https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/auditoria-e-fiscalizacao/programa-de-fiscalizacao-em-entes-federativos>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/au... )
Dependent	corruption_dic	Dichotomous counting of corruption	Dummy which 1 represents 1 or more serious failure; 0 otherwise (CGU, 2020CGU, Controladoria-Geral da União (2020) Programa de fiscalização em entes federativos. Available at: <https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/auditoria-e-fiscalizacao/programa-de-fiscalizacao-em-entes-federativos>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/au... )
Independent	social_accountability	Social accountability	Categorial variable in which 4 represents fully social accountability (no failures in composition or functioning at policy councils). One point was subtracted, up to the limit of 0, for each nonoperational policy council (CGU, 2020CGU, Controladoria-Geral da União (2020) Programa de fiscalização em entes federativos. Available at: <https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/auditoria-e-fiscalizacao/programa-de-fiscalizacao-em-entes-federativos>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/au... ).
	social_accountability_dic	Dichotomous social accountability	Dummy in which 1 represents more than 2 operational policy councils (2, 3 or 4); 0 otherwise (CGU, 2020CGU, Controladoria-Geral da União (2020) Programa de fiscalização em entes federativos. Available at: <https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/auditoria-e-fiscalizacao/programa-de-fiscalizacao-em-entes-federativos>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/au... )
	k_social	Civic density	Count of civil society organizations formally registered in the municipality (IBGE, 2010b)
Controls	region	IBGE region	IBGE political administrative region (IBGE, 2018IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia Estatística (2018) Pesquisa de informações básicas municipais - 2018. Available at: <https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/index.php/biblioteca-catalogo?view=detalhes&id=2101668>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/index.php... )
	size	IBGE size	Dummy in which 1 represents more than 20.000 inhabitants; 0 otherwise (IBGE, 2010a)
	south	South region	Dummy in which 1 represents south; 0 otherwise
	southeast	Southeast region	Dummy in which 1 represents southeast; 0 otherwise
	midwest	Midwest region	Dummy in which 1 represents midwest; 0 otherwise
	north	North region	Dummy in which 1 represents north; 0 otherwise
	northeast	Northeast region	Dummy in which 1 represents northeast; 0 otherwise
	SO	Service Orders	Number of audit service orders issued (CGU, 2020CGU, Controladoria-Geral da União (2020) Programa de fiscalização em entes federativos. Available at: <https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/auditoria-e-fiscalizacao/programa-de-fiscalizacao-em-entes-federativos>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://www.gov.br/cgu/pt-br/assuntos/au... )
Others	IBGE	IBGE code	Municipality code (IBGE, 2018IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia Estatística (2018) Pesquisa de informações básicas municipais - 2018. Available at: <https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/index.php/biblioteca-catalogo?view=detalhes&id=2101668>. Accessed on: Oct. 7, 2023. https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/index.php... )

	Dependent variable
	OLS (1)	Logistic (2)	Poisson (3)	Negative binomial (4)	Zero-inflated Count (5)	Matching (exact) (6)	Matching (nearest) (7)	Instrumental variable (8)
social_accountability_dic	-4.605^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.644)	-0.702^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.204)	-0.433^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.019)	-0.435^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.066)	-0.396^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.066)	-5.007^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.759)	-1.652^* * p < 0.1; (0.965)	-15.046^ p < 0.05; (6.498)
SO	-0.007 (0.032)	0.025^ p < 0.05; (0.010)	-0.001 (0.003)	0.001 (0.003)	-0.002 (0.003)	0.052 (0.057)	0.006 (0.038)	0.004 (0.036)
south	-10.422^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.902)	-1.954^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.261)	-1.288^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.039)	-1.308^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.096)	-1.157^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.103)	-9.846^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.192)	-14.526^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.296	-8.176^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.709)
southeast	-10.507^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.0777)	-1.807^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.244)	-1.221^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.031)	-1.223^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.082)	-1.102^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.086)	-10.677^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.942)	-14.330^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.168)	-8.967^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.282)
midwest	-8.212^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.144)	-1.283^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.333)	-0.800^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.041)	-0.796^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.119)	-0.718^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.120)	-8.746^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.598)	-11.425^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.685)	-6.874^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.509)
north	-5.269^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.014)	-0.723^ p < 0.05; (0.359)	-0.416^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.029)	-0.421^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.103)	-0.383^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.100)	-6.223^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.346)	-7.965^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.400)	-4.382^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.246)
northeast
size	-2.774^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.660)	-0.434^ p < 0.05; (0.200)	-0.261^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.019)	-0.322^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.068)	-0.288^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.068)	-2.670^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.895)	-2.081^ p < 0.05; (0.827)	-3.473^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.847)
Constant	20.106^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.108)	3.116^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.374)	3.151^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.032)	3.150^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.114)	3.181^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.114)	19.083^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.671)	21.013^* ***** p < 0.01. (1.331)	26.527^* ***** p < 0.01. (4.156)
Observations	1,223	1,223	1,223	1,223	1,223	924	818	1,223
R²	0,233					0,217	0,298	0,067
Adjusted R²	0,228					0,211	0,292	0,061
Log Likelihood		0466.280	-7,095.359	-3,819.104	-3,804.403
Theta				0.970^* ***** p < 0.01. (0.047)
Akaike Inf. Crit.		948.560	14,206.720	7,654.209
Residual Std. Error	10.448 (df = 1215)					11.199 (df = 916)	10.386 (df = 810)	11.523 (df = 1215)
F Statistic	52.605^* ***** p < 0.01. (df = 7,1215)					36.288^* ***** p < 0.01. (df = 7,916)	49.226^* ***** p < 0.01. (df = 7,810)

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[1] James Batista Vieira (james@ccsa.ufpb.br) holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from IESP/UERJ and is a professor in the Department of Public Management at UFPB.