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Abstract

The academic literature has highlighted the tensions between democracy and anti-corruption efforts, considering their changing meanings over time. These debates have been traversed by understandings of how to ensure appropriate connections between the public and the private, bearing in mind some of their alternative meanings (e.g., for the public as the state, the commons, manifest or impersonal- reasonable interests). Colombia faced these debates at two critical junctures, which led Congress to pass party and anti-corruption laws in both time periods. To contribute to the understanding of these puzzling tensions, the research aimed to solve the following question: Why did Colombian legislators understand some public-private relations as adequate for Colombian democracy, while others as corrupt in the approval of the 1992-1995 and 2010-2011 party and anti-corruption laws, and why did these understandings change? Solving this question required consulting the literature that has addressed the discussion points on democratization, corruption and the public-private. This, in order to guide the diachronic comparison. The sampling material was composed by the transcription of the debates in Congress that ended in the approval of the mentioned laws, following a qualitative content analysis. It was observed that the congresspeople tended to understand as democratic the investment of state and non-state organizational resources that were in accordance to the protection of common aspirations and impersonal-reasonable interests. Otherwise, they were labeled as corrupt. The changes were explained by modifications in the conceptions of democracy and corruption, which changed the emphasis on the protection of interests to be protected. While in the 1990s efforts focused on protecting common aspirations, in the 2010s it was placed on securing impersonal- reasonable interests guided by the principle of equality. However, due to institutional frictions between the cognitive, normative and regulative pillars, some behaviors remained in a gray zone; that is, they could not be declared illegal or suitably regulated to avoid some practices labelled as corrupt by some actors.