Legal Corruption in the Government: An Experimental Study on the Role of Civil Servants' Political Ideology

ABSTRACT Legal corruption, also known as institutional corruption, has become prevalent in the public sector, but empirical research on this subject is still at a nascent stage. Given its potentially detrimental impact on the perceived level of organizational capacity among internal members, understanding civil servants' views of legal corruption is essential. We contribute to this literature a discussion of civil servants' assessment of legal corruption in the government and evidence from a survey experiment with more than 2000 South Korean civil servants. The results of our analysis suggest that civil servants evaluate the degree of legal corruption in the government through their political lens, that is, their political ideology. Specifically, they tend to be more critical when the government is ruled by a chief executive and party that have different political views from their own, compared to when it is governed by those with the same political views. The implications of this study are clear: the central role of political views and policy preferences in understanding perceptions of legal corruption in the public sector.