Adapting Anticorruption Enforcement to an Age of Populism and Polarization




  • First, investigators, prosecutors, and courts should try to act more quickly. Conducting investigations and trials in a speedier fashion when the suspect remains in office can help limit or reduce the harm done along the way. In the U.S., the House of Representatives probably should not have waited a month after the impeachment vote before delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Similarly, Israel’s Chief of Police and Attorney General could probably have investigated and indicted Netanyahu faster than the four years it took; if they had done so, the indictment might have issued several months before the first elections, rather than just a few weeks afterward. Moving forward, assuming the Covid-19 postponement eventually lifts, the court presiding over Netanyahu’s trial should use its broad discretion over the criminal procedure to minimize Netanyahu’s attempts to prolong it.
  • Second, senior law enforcement officials should be more willing to communicate with the public and to try to shape public opinion. While keeping in mind the importance of restraint and professionalism, senior officials like Israel’s Attorney General should consider using press releases, press conferences, and social media much more extensively than is done today, in order to convey accessible factual information and counter the attempts of Netanyahu’s spokespeople and political followers to sway the public opinion through distortions and outright misrepresentations. In the U.S., while such statements are rare, there are some examples, such as Chief Justice Robert’s statement, in response to President Trump disparaging the judge who issued an adverse ruling as an “Obama judge,” that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, what we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
  • Third, prosecutors and courts should be more aggressive about using obstruction of justice and contempt of court charges. In Israel, the Attorney General can and should consider enforcing charges of obstruction of justice and contempt of court even when the misconduct in question is relatively minor compared to the main charges. Such remedies should be invoked swiftly in cases involving witness intimidation and defamation, the superfluous summoning of witnesses, tactical requests for delaying court sessions with no evidence-backed reasons, and others. In Israel, such infractions are typically not punished, especially in high-profile cases, but prosecuting them is of particular importance in corruption cases involving politicians who are more likely to benefit from engaging in this type of behavior. Prosecuting these charges in a speedy interim procedure is likely to be much more effective in deterring this type of behavior and preventing some of the collateral harm that it facilitates.

One of the troubling phenomena resulting from populism and polarization is the spectacle of corrupt leaders going after their own government’s law institutions of justice. These institutions must adjust to the new reality and learn to fight back—not by stooping to the populists’ level, but by using the available legitimate tools to convey reliable information to the public and to administer swifter and more effective justice against sitting politicians.

3 thoughts on “Adapting Anticorruption Enforcement to an Age of Populism and Polarization

  1. Hi Haggai. Thank you very much for this very interesting post. I do not know anything about the situation in Israel. I know only a little bit about the facts in the United States. However, I have been monitoring the experience with a populist president in Brazil. Your suggestions, all of them directly related to government authorities, are excellent. Nevertheless, at least in the Brazilian case, populist politicians usually obtain popular support to their measures and discourses against law-enforcement institutions from social media, especially in the current Internet era. The dissemination of fake information and even of hate speech is widespread, fostering polarization. Thus, I guess that a way of countering this phenomenon would also be helpful. The main challenge is that any attempt in this direction involves technical difficulties and freedom of expression issues.

  2. Thanks Haggai for your great post about the challenges of addressing corruption in a new age of politicians who routinely and successfully undermine the very institutions set up to hold them accountable. I also appreciated your recommendations and was particularly interested in the second one, about law enforcement bodies more effectively communicating with the public, even using social media to inform and shape public discourse. What types of communication do you think would be the most effective ( i.e. one-way official press releases or more two-way communication via social media)? Picking up on what Rodrigo pointed out, populist leaders are quite skilled at using current media environments to further their platforms and disparage legal institutions. As someone more familiar with the U.S. context I see the utility of law enforcement communicating more regularly and directly with the public, but wonder how they can reach parts of the population who already distrust them. These are people who receive information from their networks or rather echo chambers where new information from sources labeled as “distrusted” is often disregarded. I know this is a hard question but important to think about. Finally, do you know of other countries with populist leadership where this type of more direct engagement by law enforcement has been particularly effective or ineffective? I know you are comparing Israel and the U.S. and each context has its own nuances but I’d be curious to know how other countries have adapted to this wave of populist attacks on institutions.

    • These are great points! The question of ‘how’ naturally follows the ‘should’, but it may very well be the more interesting and challenging one. I imagine, for example, the DOJ having a budget for Facebook sponsored posts where they use FB’s algorithms to target X’s supporters/followers (X being some populist public official) and convey the accurate information that X is knowingly distorting/lying about. This would be just one example of what I would envision as an array of tools that governmental offices would have at their disposal to tackle different problems of this type

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