title: The dynamics of corruption and anti-corruption
title: uncovering complex secrets, gatekeeping, and social movements
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Chun, Hyunsik
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2026
Subjects: subject: Candlelight Movement
subject: Complex Secrets
subject: Organizations
subject: Secrecy
subject: Corruption
subject: Social Movements
subject: Criminology
subject: FOS: Law

description: There is growing concern about the persistence of grand corruption in liberal democracies, where people feel helpless due to their limited influence on elected officials and bureaucrats who serve the interests of corruption networks. This dissertation examines the dynamics of grand corruption and anti-corruption investigations to understand when grand corruption remains hidden or leads to political and legal consequences.
description: I combined qualitative text analysis with automated text analysis and examined five corruption investigation cases that targeted the corrupt relationship between Geun-hye Park and the Choi family between the 1970s and 2017. I focused on why the first four investigations failed while the last one successfully discovered the secrets of the grand corruption and generated significant legal and political consequences.
description: In Chapter I, I overview sociological theories on organized secrecy and deception and conceptualize grand corruption as a complex secret problem that has unique defensive mechanisms for the protection of secrets of corruption. I also discussed how the complex secret perspective can extend our understanding of the dynamics of corruption and anti-corruption.
description: In Chapter II, through the analysis of the first two empirical cases, I identified the first defensive mechanisms of corrupt actors that protect the secrets of grand corruption from external audiences (e.g., anti-corruption investigators): informational suppression. It includes limited access to information, people's cognitive limitations that make it difficult to correctly "see" the evidence of corruption. And, the status of corrupt actors also affects the newsworthiness and revelation of the evidence of corruption.
description: In Chapter III, I introduced another defensive mechanism that can be observed in the third and fourth empirical cases of my study: political diversion. From those cases, I show that even when anti-corruption investigations secure some evidence of corruption, they often fail to make a significant outcome because corrupt actors develop political diversion tactics to distract people's attention from the discovered corruption. These tactics include distraction (the creation of pseudo-events), new corruption, and political compromise. From the failed investigation cases between 1990 and 2015, I showed how political diversion effectively limited anti-corruption investigations even when the evidence of the grand corruption was partly available.
description: In Chapter IV, I examined the 2016 Geun-hye Park and Soon-sil Choi Gate to show that the concatenation of three anti-corruption mechanisms (piecemeal revelations, political pressure, and social pressure) can collectively produce political and legal consequences. The last case is made up of three stages and for each stage a mechanism is added. Through qualitative and computational text data analysis, I found that a legitimacy crisis these three mechanisms collectively co-produce limited the influence of political diversion tactics and make alliances of corrupt actors turn against them.
description: From the close examination of these five corruption investigation cases, I argue that analyzing grand corruption as a complex secret problem helps us to understand the dynamics between corruption and anti-corruption and gives us new insights on when the secrets of corruption are kept protected by two defensive mechanisms and how they are discovered through three anti-corruption mechanisms.