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Introduction
The political scandal that came to light in October 2016 sent Korean society into a great shock. Local and foreign media viewed the scandal as one of the worst instances of corruption, which angered the majority of the people as they called for the impeachment of the President. Although corruption still occurs in South Korea, the 2016 presidential scandal is quite different from others in at least two aspects—the scope and magnitude of corruption. Those who were at the pinnacle in politics, government and business allegedly engaged in this corruption scandal. Key players in this grand corruption include the President, her top staff at the Presidential Office, several ministers, high-ranking public officials, and CEOs of large conglomerates, or chaebols. Among corruption scandals in South Korea, the 2016 scandal is certainly one of the largest in terms of number of those who involved in the scandal. Furthermore, this scandal led to the nation’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, being impeached for the first time in the Korean politics, causing citizens to doubt where the nation’s integrity was headed. Many Koreans thought that the 2016 scandal certainly set the several decade-long anti-corruption reforms back in South Korea. The 2016 scandal offered South Korea a crucial moment to rethink current policies and measures for controlling and preventing a chronic corruption problem.
This paper aims at examining the effectiveness of anti-corruption institutions in South Korea. In doing so, it relies on institutional theory in assessing the achievements of corruption-fighting efforts of the Korean government and in identifying the key challenges of anti-corruption reform in South Korea. By distinguishing institutional building from institutionalization, this paper argues that the Korean government has been equipped with a fairly strong, if not perfect, anti-corruption institutional framework to cope with low-level petty corruption; yet this institutional framework has not been effective in handling high-level grand corruption due to weak institutionalization[1].
This paper is structured as follows. The next section briefly sketches changes in corruption in South Korea. The third section provides institutional theory which is of use in analyzing the success and failure of anti-corruption reforms in South Korea. The fourth section examines what the Korean government has done to build anti-corruption institutions and to what extent these institutions have been effective in...