8 - Prosecutorial Trade-Offs and the Precarity of Hope

Summary

The chapter finds that satisfaction with the investigation in Peru correlates with positive emotions and optimistic prognoses about the future. Different emotional reactions are further associated with voters’ varying propensities to tolerate corruption: positive emotions are linked to severity and negative ones to cynicism. A conjoint experiment shows that the taskforce indeed induces voters to impose greater penalties on politicians than other sources of corruption allegations. The chapter leverages another conjoint to document how voters respond to trade-offs at the heart of prosecutorial efforts, and thus better understand why such investigative choices eventually complicate citizens’ relationship with crusades. The conjoint reveals that Peruvians are reluctant to endorse leniency agreements at the heart of the investigative strategy. Together with additional descriptive survey statistics measuring reactions to other controversies triggered by Lava Jato, the experimental results underscore how hard it is for prosecutors to cement hope in anti-corruption.