Dr Mario Hidalgo Jara

Social Accountability Mechanisms and Controlling Corruption: the Case of Ecuador (2007-2016)

PhD completed in 2021 | > UCL Discovery - open access

Supervisors:

Dr Par Engstrom and Professor Maxine Molyneux

Corruption is an endemic problem that attacks the foundations of democracy and avoids full development of societies, depriving them of better access to education, basic services, infrastructure, among other issues.

Multiple efforts have been made ​​to combat corruption and multiple surveillance mechanisms have been implemented for the same effect. Citizen participation and its various mechanisms of social control is one of them. Its existence’s aim is, among others, to have people monitoring and controlling public institutions. However, there are specific problems that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms and dilute their essence, thus allowing corruption to perpetuate with impunity.

The objective of my research was to determine, based on the experience of Ecuador and Uruguay, the impact of citizen participation in controlling corruption and to establish what obstacles make this participation less efficient.