ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 (“Why Argentina?”) I introduce Latin America’s anticorruption revival and use Argentina’s case to show that the region is in urgent need for institutional reform to overcome ideological public–private biases and a prevailing cultural-criminal approach. I also explain why in structurally corrupt nations such as Argentina the political economy of anticorruption reform is almost as significant as reform itself and then select a functional methodology toward a particular analytic goal: understanding how both the country’s public and private sectors converge to shape high-level corruption involving federal public functions. At the end of the chapter, I describe the typologies through which I pursue my analytic goal. State-capture, bilateral monopoly, and kleptocracy distinctions command this framework.
