The U.S. Government’s Framing of Corruption: A Content Analysis of 35 Years of DOJ Reports

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Constructing Crime and Victimhood

Abstract

Political corruption is a complicated issue, with pundits, scholars, and armchair theorists speculating on what makes politics so seemingly systemically corruptible. The issue of corruption is made even more complicated by the fact that the major quantitative United States corruption data available are numbers of corruption convictions presented by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and this data is widely critiqued for a variety of reasons. However, what has yet to be analyzed concerning this corruption data is the context in which the data is constructed. In other words, to date, there is no analysis of how corruption is interpreted and framed by the DOJ. Adopting a constructionist framework, I aim to understand the rhetoric and frames the DOJ uses to construct political corruption in America. Using a content analysis of thirty-five years of annual DOJ reports to Congress, I find: 1) the DOJ never explicitly defines what corruption is; 2) the DOJ pays particular attention to the most dramatic cases of corruption (as opposed to the more mundane, typical cases) and emphasizes private businesses and individual malfeasance as exemplars of corruption. Furthermore, 3) over time, the DOJ has rhetorically emphasized the appearance of fairness and impartiality. Finally and most practically, 4) the DOJ has recently stopped briefly detailing each case they worked on in a year, and instead only present major highlights. I conclude that the DOJ frames corruption in a way that limits the ability for meaningful social change to occur at an institutional level.

Author

• Ryan Ceresola, Southern Illinois University