Brazil's democracy has repeatedly suffered major corruption scandals, despite numerous reforms designed to overcome entrenched patterns of illicit behavior. Why? What has caused corruption scandals to recur across some four decades of presidential administrations? And what are the implications of Brazil's experience for efforts to enhance accountability elsewhere?

Addressing these questions, Matthew Taylor and Luciano Da Ros provide a framework for evaluating the bottlenecks to effective accountability in Brazil and analyse the successes and failures of anticorruption efforts from the early days of the democratic transition through the demise of the massive Lava Jato investigations.