Over the past thirty years, the anti-corruption agenda has been integrated into dominant discourses of development, good governance, and democracy, reshaping political practices and knowledge production. This involved redefining concepts, operationalizing measures, and legitimizing policies. While academics have renewed focus on corruption, emphasizing global convergences and institutional designs, limited attention is given to how anti-corruption expertise is constituted and mobilized. Gaps remain in understanding the approaches shaping anti-corruption knowledge and how inequalities in knowledge production influence public policy. Recognizing its embeddedness requires examining historical roots, key actors, methods, and mobilization channels. This chapter uncovers the historical origins of anti-corruption conceptions, identifies experts by epistemological and methodological approaches, and interprets their positions. The study identifies three dominant poles of power: American academics, quantitative economists, and media-exposed practitioners. These poles reflect disparities in professional stability, autonomy, and proximity to international financial institutions. Using a historic, reflexive, and relational perspective, the investigation maps the social forces and structures shaping the field, offering insights into the production and mobilization of anti-corruption knowledge.

Chapter 2 introduces the logic, basic mathematics, and some of the benefits of turning regression inside out in the context of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. We do this through an in-depth reimagining of a classic analysis of the effects of welfare state spending on poverty. The chapter introduces novel techniques for regression decomposition, data visualization, and geometric data analysis.