FILSAFAT KORUPSI - Direktori File UPI

eform and industrial policy. The success of land reform in Korea and Taiwan produced
unusually equal distribution of income and wealth in these countries unlike in the
Philippines where land reform failed. Chaebol-centered industrialization in Korea
gradually increased inequality in income and wealth compared to Taiwan, however,
where economic concentration has been deliberately avoided by the state. I intend to
show that the success and failure of land reform and the initial adoption of industrial
policy were affected very little by corruption and/or social trust but that these exogenous
events produced different levels of inequality, and thereby different levels of corruption
and social trust.
In my case studies of corruption and social trust, I use both the quantitative and
qualitative data available. I use data from the World Values Surveys (1980-2000) and the
Korea General Social Surveys (2003-2004), data on the experience of corruption and the
perceived levels of corruption from multiple sources, journalistic reports of corruption
including the prosecutorial report of illegal political funds, and other relevant data from
secondary sources.
My case study will not only test my and existing theories of corruption and social
trust, but also contribute to understanding development in Korea, and more broadly in
East Asia, by critically reviewing and overcoming the weaknesses in developmental state
literature and crony capitalism literature.
The organization of this thesis is as follows. Chapter II develops a normative theory of
corruption, using Rawls‘ (1971) concept of ‗formal justice.‘ I discuss how corruption,
as a breach of ‗formal justice‘, and inequality, as a problem of ‗distributive justice‘
generally reinforce each other, and why corruption erodes social trust. I also examine
the cases of conflict between formal justice and substantive justice, and propose that
corruption may be justified only when the gain in substantive justice outweighs the
sacrifice of formal justice.
Chapter III provides a theoretical account of why inequality increases corruption, in
particular in democracies and conducts cross-national statistical analysis to test my
hypotheses. Chapter IV examines what explains Korea‘s level of corruption relative to
Taiwan and the Philippines as well as across time within Korea, focusing on the role of
land reform and industrial policy.
In Chapter V, I propose a new theory of social trust that emphasizes the role of fairness
of legal and political institutions and distributive fairness, and present the results of
multilevel hierarchical analyses. In particular, I test multiple implications of the fairness
and similarity explanations. Chapter VI attempts to explain Korea‘s level of social trust,
relative to Taiwan and the Philippines as well as across time within Korea, focusing on
the role of inequality and corruption and the close correlation between political trust and
social trust. Chapter VII summarizes and highlights the scholarly contributions I have
made in this thesis and discusses the research and policy implications.
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