The Social Life of Anti-Corruption Narratives: Media and Campaign Representations in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

The current study examines how anti-corruption is publicly constructed as a defence of democratic accountability across Sub-SaharanAfrica. It analyses a purposive corpus of 80 publicly available texts, comprising news articles, LinkedIn posts and civil society campaignartefacts, produced between 2022 and 2025 across eighteen Sub-Saharan countries. Drawing on Social Representations Theory (SRT) andNarrative Theory (NT) and informed by an adapted Proppian heuristic for narrative sequencing, the study examines how anti-corruptionis anchored in familiar moral categories, objectified through public symbols, institutions and events, and mobilised through recurringnarrative structures that shape expectations of accountability and reform. The analysis identifies six recurring social representationsthat function as socially shared interpretive resources through which anti-corruption is understood, communicated and enacted acrosspublic narratives: Collective Responsibility, Everyday Accountability, Justice through Law, Civic Courage, Tangible Accountability andEthical Renewal. Rather than representing discrete governance activities, these representations organise shared understandings of whatanti-corruption is, who is responsible for it, how accountability should operate, and what constitutes meaningful democratic reform.Comparative analysis indicates that while these narrative functions appear across the region, South African cases place particular emphasison procedural visibility and institutional accountability, operating as symbolic reference points within wider continental debates on thecredibility of reform. Findings demonstrate that anti-corruption narratives are not merely reflections of governance reform but constituteshared systems of meaning through which democratic accountability is imagined, legitimised and sustained.