A accountability social como mecanismo de saneamento de mercado: a proteção da livre concorrência e o combate à seleção adversa nas contratações públicas

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates the reconfiguration of the control system in Brazilian public procurement under the framework of the New Bidding and Contracts Law, proposing social accountability as a structural element for administrative integrity and the cleansing of the business environment. The study starts from the diagnosis of the exhaustion of the "defensive formalism" model of the repealed law that governed the matter, whose emphasis on procedural bureaucracy proved incapable of containing systemic corruption, fostering the economic phenomenon of "adverse selection," through which inefficient or dishonest companies drive ethical economic agents out of the public tender. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the research is anchored in theories to reframe transparency as an instrumental freedom indispensable to human development and the protection of fundamental rights; concurrently, it uses political realism to demonstrate that, in the context of Brazilian delegative democracies, social control acts as a mechanism of "vertical activation," breaking the inertia and co-optation of horizontal control institutions. The thesis argues that citizen vigilance, empowered by the open data technology of the National Public Procurement Portal (PNCP), projects direct effects on Business Law by drastically raising the reputational and legal risk of fraud. It is concluded that social accountability acts as a market cleansing mechanism, protecting real free competition against the abuse of economic power and valuing the social function of the company. By imposing entry barriers to opportunism and transforming corporate integrity (compliance and ESG) into a requirement for economic survival, social control reconnects market efficiency to democratic legitimacy, consolidating the ideal of a high-intensity democracy.