ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the scene by briefly tracing Brazil’s decades-long history of corruption scandals, anti-corruption promises embedded in political rhetoric, and bottom-up and top-down efforts that have resulted in the digitalisation of anti-corruption in the country since democracy was restored in the mid-1980s. It also provides an overview of the evolution of digital technologies in Brazil since the 1990s, when the term “e-Gov” emerged. It covers the period when the government started to implement digital systems for handling procedures, documents, and services, and more recent attempts to bridge digital gaps and implement digital government, wherein digital strategies are designed to address citizens’ needs and concerns. This thick description showing how Brazil went digital, also to fight corruption, serves to establish a connection between anti-corruption and digital technologies, necessary to identify and explain the main characteristics of both in terms of policies and actions. In this chapter, therefore, we provide context that we believe is relevant not only for analysing the case of Brazil but also for providing a basis for further comparison.
