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Z Vgl Polit Wiss (2013) (Suppl) 7:219–242DOI 10.1007/s12286-013-0167-4

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea

Christian Göbel

Abstract: This article contributes to the emerging research agenda of anti-corruption. Specifi-cally, it enquires into the factors that are beneficial for the fight against corruption by comparing corruption and anti-corruption in the Republic of China on Taiwan (henceforth: Taiwan) and South Korea (henceforth: Korea). These countries not only display considerable similarity in their context variables, but also began to implement anti-corruption programs after democratization. The study finds that democratization alone is not enough to initiate anti-corruption programs, but needs to be paired with or followed by a change in ruling parties. It also illustrates how a fundamental mismatch between the interests of the dominant political actors and the institutions that incentivize corrupt behaviour benefits anti-corruption. Counter-intuitively, this tends not to be the case when political corruption occurs in transient networks of little complexity, but when the new rulers are faced with sophisticated, complex and deeply embedded structures that make access for “outsiders” difficult.

Keywords: Critical juncture · Corruption · Anti-corruption · Democratization

Entfesselte Krieger: Critical Junctures und Korruptionsbekämpfung in Taiwan und Südkorea

Zusammenfassung: Der vorliegende Artikel möchte einen Beitrag zur gegenwärtigen Diskus-sion über Korruptionsbekämpfung leisten. Im Speziellen untersucht der Beitrag dabei die Fakto-ren, die die Bekämpfung von Korruption begünstigen, indem vergleichend Korruption und Kor-ruptionsbekämpfung in der Republik China auf Taiwan (im Folgenden: Taiwan) und Südkorea (im Folgenden: Korea) untersucht werden. Beide Länder weisen nicht nur bemerkenswerte Ge-meinsamkeiten bei den Kontextvariablen auf, sondern begannen ihre Korruptionsbekämpfungs-maßnahmen nach dem Demokratisierungsprozess zu implementieren. Der Beitrag kommt jedoch zu dem Ergebnis, dass Demokratisierung alleine nicht ausreicht, um Korruptionsbekämpfungs-programme zu initiieren. Vielmehr müssen diese mit einem Regierungswechsel einhergehen bzw. ihm folgen. Der Beitrag unterstreicht zudem, dass Korruptionsbekämpfung von einem Missver-hältnis zwischen den Interessen dominierender politischer Akteure und den Institutionen, die

Published online: 16.10.2013 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2013

Prof. Dr. C. Göbel ()Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Campus-Altes AKH, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna, Austriae-mail: Christian.Goebel@univie.ac.at

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Korruption begünstigen, profitiert. Entgegen der Erwartung ist dies jedoch nicht der Fall, wenn Korruption in kurzlebigen und wenig komplexen Netzwerken erfolgt, sondern gerade wenn eine neue Regierung mit ausdifferenzierten, komplexen und tief verwurzelten Strukturen konfrontiert wird, die den Zugang für Außenseiter erschweren.

Schlüsselwörter: Critical juncture · Korruption · Korruptionsbekämpfung · Demokratisierung

1 Introduction

If the respondents interviewed for Transparency International’s (TI) Global Corruption Barometers (GCB) are correct in their perceptions, then the world is becoming increas-ingly corrupt. Worldwide, the majority of respondents routinely state that corruption has worsened in their country, that they deem anti-corruption policies to be ineffective, and that they do not expect the situation to improve in the next years (Transparency Inter-national 2013). At the aggregate level, this has been the situation for the last ten years (Transparency International 2013).

This phenomenon resonates with a general scepticism among researchers that anti-corruption efforts will produce quick results. While some scholars see corruption as being dependent on attitudes such as trust that tend to change only gradually (see for example Uslaner 2008), others highlight the fact that corrupt systems follow fundamentally differ-ent institutional logics from those which are based on the rule of law (Kang 2001). Seen from this perspective, anti-corruption requires the change of not only individual institu-tions, but of a whole regime of governance, which also tends to be difficult and time-consuming. Unfortunately, leading politicians are often themselves entangled in corrupt networks and are therefore unwilling to change the status quo. Anna Persson, Jan Teorell and Bo Rothstein therefore argue that anti-corruption should not be seen as a principal-agent problem, but a collective action problem (Persson et al. 2013): corruption persists mainly because political leaders lack the will to fight corruption, and not because they are unable to ensure the compliance of those tasked with fighting corruption.

How, then, can corruption be reduced? How are changes in incentives brought about, making it more likely that leading politicians do fight corruption? Can corruption be reduced gradually, as Michael Johnston argues (Johnston 2005), or are radical reforms more likely to yield results, as Bo Rothstein holds (Rothstein 2011)? In the case of radical reforms, when are they especially likely to emerge?

The present study seeks to provide some initial answers to these questions by applying the “critical juncture” framework developed by Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier (Collier and Collier 1991) to political corruption and anti-corruption in the Republic of China on Taiwan (henceforth: Taiwan) and South Korea (henceforth: Korea). Corruption is defined as the “abuse of public office for private gain” and is manifested in behaviour such as embezzlement, bribery, sale of office, favouritism, and nepotism (World Bank 2013). The term “anti-corruption” encompasses all measures designed to reduce or abol-ish corruption, in particular the passage of laws that render corruption illegal, as well as the strict and impartial enforcement of these laws. The study will be confined to political or “grand” corruption, which involves the systemic abuse of political office for personal

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 221

gain. “Petty” corruption and corruption involving only the business sector are excluded from the analysis.

The critical juncture framework sets out from the premise that radical institutional change, i.e. a fundamental change of established formal and informal rules that govern human behaviour, is difficult: once institutions become a standard for regulating behaviour, considerable cost and energy is necessary to change these institutions, even if history has rendered them inefficient or obsolete (Thelen 1999). According to Collier and Collier, the occurrence of radical institutional change is especially likely after the escalation of con-flicts, crises, and other disruptions of the status quo, because this provides politicians with a window of opportunity that is normally not available (Collier and Collier 1991, p. 33).

The cases of Taiwan and Korea were chosen because they are very similar in terms of their geographical location, culture, economic development, regime type, and timing of regime change. Another important similarity pertains to the central role of corruption in maintaining not only the autocratic regime, but also the democracy that emerged from the transition. Finally, both countries began to establish anti-corruption regimes—Korea in 1993, and Taiwan in 2000. However, although Taiwan has a shorter history of anti-corruption, corruption seems to be fought with more vigour than in Korea.

In terms of method, the paper will conduct a “structured, focused” comparison (George and Bennett 2005, p. 67–72) of corruption and anti-corruption in Taiwan and Korea. “Structured” means that general questions reflecting the research objective “are asked of each case under study to guide and standardize data collection” (George and Bennett 2005, p. 68). However, while historical developments can be relevant for a variety of theoretical topics, the researcher’s “treatment of a historical episode must be selectively focused in accordance with the type of theory” he is developing (George and Bennett 2005, p. 70).

By analysing corruption and anti-corruption in both cases, the study will assess the explanatory power of the “gradualism” position on the one hand and of the “critical junctures” framework on the other when applied to corruption and anti-corruption. At the same time, it will identify the circumstances and factors that make it expedient for political leaders to fight political corruption, thereby contributing to the emerging anti-corruption literature.

2 Anti-corruption and the power of institutions

The view that corruption is bad and must be fought is the normative worldview underly-ing organizations devoted to the fight against corruption. Such organizations, among oth-ers Transparency International and the World Bank, produce rankings of countries based on their corruption scores. They do not make allowances for contextual factors such as a country’s stage of development and the prevalent form of corruption. Several researchers have challenged this position. Most notably, Samuel Huntington made the famous argu-ment that “in terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, overcentralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over-centralized and honest bureaucracy” (Huntington 1968, p. 69). Other researchers have made a similar point: at early stages of development, some forms of corruption, for example “rent-scraping” and “dividend-collecting” can be beneficial to a country’s development (Wedeman 1997).

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At later stages of development, however, what might have been an asset becomes a burden. Corruption becomes dysfunctional as a country develops further, and the chal-lenge arises of how to curb corruption and champion the rule of law. Despite increasing dysfunctionality, political corruption tends to persist. The challenge of fighting corruption is not one of merely outlawing, detecting and punishing corrupt behaviour, but rather one of political leaders committing to fundamental institutional change (Persson et al. 2013).

Institutions are formal or informal rules that structure individual behaviour and con-tribute to the predictability of a person’s actions in highly regulated situations. This predictability in turn allows that person to engage in long-term commitments. Such pre-dictability can be achieved by both parties adhering to written laws and regulations that apply to everyone and are effectively enforced (“legal contract”), but also by generat-ing “strategic” and “particularized trust” (Uslaner 2005, p. 77) within interpersonal rela-tionships (“relational contract”) (Winn 1994, p. 191). Both systems are structured by institutional frameworks that can be mutually compatible, but also conflictive. The latter is the case if informal arrangements undermine written laws (as political corruption by definition does).

Institutionalism, which is concerned with the conditions under which rules and regula-tions change or are maintained, does not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate behaviour, but analyses the costs of changing a given institutional setup (“transaction costs”). Both the legal and the relational contract system require investments for their maintenance. In the case of the rule of law, the government is expected to shoulder these costs not only by providing for courts, hiring judges and prosecutors, disseminating laws etc., but also by maintaining, supporting or regulating socializing institutions like schools, churches and the media (Winn 1994).

In the absence of reliable formal institutions regulating social behaviour, uncertainty is reduced by building up informal relationships, whose transaction costs must be shoul-dered by the involved individuals themselves. The kind of capital they must invest can be grasped by concepts like cultural capital, social capital, relational capital, or membership in informal mutual exchange networks. The “standing” an individual enjoys, however, depends on prior, irretrievable investments made by the person himself or by other per-sons on behalf of him (“sunk costs”). Examples are money and efforts invested in self-improvement, memberships in exclusive clubs, expensive gifts, invitations for travel, and of course personal favours (Schramm and Taube 2005). The dividing line between invest-ing in personal networks and corruption is notoriously thin (Heberer 2001).

How to “switch” from one system to the other is the key concern of anti-corruption studies. One common position held by scholars and major anti-corruption organizations alike is that such systemic change should proceed gradually and can take generations to be completed (Rothstein 2011, p. 24). This seems to resonate with the tenet of his-torical institutionalism, a variant of institutionalism, that institutions tend to be “path-dependent”: present-day decisions are limited by institutional configurations that have been set up in the past. Accordingly, institutional change tends to proceed only gradually (Thelen 1999). However, a precondition of any change is that it is initiated by someone. At the very least, political leaders must be committed to fighting corruption. This poses a problem, because political elites are often involved in political corruption themselves.

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 223

By initiating an anti-corruption program, they would, at the very least, lose the capital they invested into clientelist networks. Second, they would place themselves at disadvantage vis-à-vis political opponents who continue to reap the benefits of being members of a corrupt network. Third, they might become implicated in a corruption scan-dal and face the legal consequences. It is for this reason that anti-corruption efforts based on a principal-agent understanding of politics do not work, as Persson, Teorell and Roth-stein convincingly argue: where corruption is systemic, the principals are as involved in corrupt activities as the supposed agents. It thus makes sense to frame the struggle to replace “relational contracts” by “legal contracts” in social transactions as a collective action problem, as the authors do. While isolated instances of bribery can be reduced by severely punishing such practices, embedded corruption requires that those who previ-ously benefited from the rules of the game become active in changing them (Persson et al. 2013). As of now, not much insight exists on how such a feat can be accomplished (Persson et al. 2013, p. 466).

The notion of “critical junctures” might provide a means to study this question. As Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier point out, institutions can undergo fundamental changes, albeit under certain conditions. They posit that radical institutional change is especially likely when a “cleavage”, for example an exacerbated conflict between regime, work-ers and employers, or an economic or political “crisis” facilitates institutional change. Prompted by certain historical legacies (“antecedent conditions”), cleavages and crises might discredit existing institutions or bring new actors with diverging interests into posi-tions of power. These developments might usher in a period of institutional change that institutionalist scholars call a “critical juncture”.

A critical juncture represents “a situation in which the structural (that is, economic, cultural, ideological, organizational) influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period, with two main consequences: the range of plausible choices open to powerful political actors expands substantially and the consequences of their decisions for the outcome of interest are potentially much more momentous” (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007, p. 343). Major political, economic or social disruptions like crises, disasters or regime changes free actors from previous constraints and allow them to change even long-standing institutions.

The subsequent sections will conduct a structured, focused analysis of institutional change in Taiwan and Korea. The analysis will be conducted as an analytical narrative guided by the critical junctures framework. In general terms, it will establish if political corruption in Taiwan and Korea contributed to a crisis that opened a critical juncture for radical institutional reform. In addition, it will examine the political decision-making pro-cess during the critical juncture to assess to which degree the actions of the political lead-ers were constrained by the antecedent conditions that preceded the crisis. By carefully narrating the process in which corruption was outlawed and corrupt behaviour punished, the study will also allow for a test of the competing understanding of anti-corruption: that reforms best proceed gradually, and that they need not be preceded by a crisis.

Drawing on the critical junctures framework outlined above, the study is guided by the following questions:

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● How did political corruption work in each case? Which actors were involved, and what were the formal and informal rules guiding corrupt exchanges? (Antecedent Conditions).

● Was institutional change the result of a critical juncture facilitated by a crisis, or did it proceed gradually? If the former, what was the crisis, and how did it expand the range of options available for political leaders? (Crisis)

● How significant was institutional change? Was corruption effectively outlawed, rep-resenting a break with previous practices? Did the “antecedent conditions” constrain the options available to political leaders? (Institutional change)

● Were these regulations effectively implemented? If not, what constrained effective implementation? Can we justifiably speak of institutional change, or are anti-corrup-tion laws merely a fig-leaf to conceal institutional continuity? (Outcomes)

The study will be confined to political or “grand” corruption, which involves the systemic abuse of political office for personal gain. “Petty” corruption and corruption involving only the business sector are excluded from the analysis.

3 Antecedent conditions: embedded political corruption in Taiwan and Korea

After the end of World War II, political corruption became embedded in the two regimes, albeit in different ways. Faced with hostility from the native population and having learned a lesson from their defeat in the civil war against the Communist Party of China, the Kuomintang (KMT) government rebuilt its regime and traded money for legitimacy via local elections. The Korean leadership, which at first did not have to worry about alienation from the population, instead installed a predatory state: politicians lined their pockets with public resources, but made no investments into the improvement of the country (You 2005).

Taiwan’s governance regime is rooted in a particular arrangement that was fashioned after the KMT forces had lost the civil war against the Chinese Communists in 1949 and fled to Taiwan. Between 1945 and 1949, around 1.8 million soldiers, bureaucrats and other KMT personnel moved to the island, which was already inhabited by a population of six million people. Most of these people were Han Chinese, as were the immigrants. Apart from the Han Chinese, half a million Japanese still lived in Taiwan, as did a minority of aboriginal tribes that had inhabited Taiwan for thousands of years. Although the majority of the “Taiwanese” were of the same ethnicity as the “Mainlanders” that arrived in the late 1940s, relations between the two groups quickly soured. The slaughter of thousands of Taiwanese by KMT forces on February 28, 1947 and the exclusion of the Taiwanese from positions of political power cemented a sub-ethnic cleavage between “Taiwanese” and “Mainlanders” that exists to this day (Chu and Lin 1996). Hence, the émigré KMT government had to assume that it was resented by at least 75 % of the population. This put it into the extraordinarily difficult situation of having to start its rule over Taiwan without a tangible legitimacy base. This base was established by reforming the party state in the early 1950s. One measure taken was to exchange access to political spoils for political support by local elites. The principal vehicle for this transaction was elections.

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While the KMT government engaged in political reforms and introduced limited elec-tions voluntarily to enhance its grip on society, post-war South Korean politics bore the hallmarks of a predatory state (You 2005). It has to be stressed that despite the overall low quality of governance, elections were implemented here as well. In contrast to Taiwan, however, where local elections served as a tool to maintain social stability, the intro-duction of national-level elections in Korea was largely the result of external pressure. Through military bases on Korean territory, substantial development aid and the political backing of the first Korean president Syngman Rhee, the United States government was in a position to demand the holding of national elections. The Korean leadership, fearing to lose control over society (Kang 2001, pp. 79–80), engaged in massive electoral fraud and frequent changes of the electoral rules, “which heightened the access barrier to the political process just when the opposition believed to have surpassed it” (Göbel 2006). Rather than enhancing the accountability of the regime, these elections in fact provided incentives for political corruption.

Put in a nutshell, elections in Taiwan served as a transmission belt between the authori-tarian émigré regime and powerful social groups, and complemented the administrative and party reform that the regime underwent in the 1950s. In contrast, Korean politicians did not engage in regime-building and regarded elections as a nuisance. Hence, the Tai-wanese population was effectively made an accomplice to consolidating a one-party authoritarian regime, whereas the Korean population was excluded from a political pro-cess in which state elites predated on South Korea’s limited resources. This difference in institutional arrangements is one major reason that the KMT one-party regime was remarkable stable through most of the 45 years of authoritarian rule, while popular upris-ings and military putsches became a hallmark of Korean politics. It also accounts for the different institutional arrangements in which corrupt activities were exercised.

3.1 Corruption as an exchange between money and legitimacy in Taiwan

As in other authoritarian regimes, KMT regime elites faced the double task of having to reward the members of its “winning coalition” (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003) and to prevent a regime opposition from emerging. The hostility on the part of the Taiwanese population against the “Mainlander” regime complicated this task considerably.

Besides imposing martial law and ruthlessly putting down dissent, the KMT managed to uphold stability by weaving clientelist networks, which were centred on influential Taiwanese families, into the regime. It did so by implementing local elections, in which two or more “local factions”, as these networks are called, competed against each other. As other parties were outlawed, local candidates had the choice of either becoming KMT members and thereby receiving access to a formidable campaign machine, or running as independents. The chances of winning an election by running as an independent were very low, so local elites chose to become KMT members. Thereby, they gave the party legitimacy (Göbel 2012).

To gain votes, the local candidates made use of vote brokers affiliated with a faction. Vote brokers were influential or charismatic individuals who mobilized friends, relatives, employees and neighbours by using persuasion, promises and money to solicit votes (Rig-ger 1994, pp. 94–98, 167–172; see also Chan 1999). Although local elections were at least

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semi-competitive, they served a different purpose than in developed democracies. Rather than enabling a choice between different party or candidate platforms, they served as a bazaar in which power and money were exchanged. Local factions organized their influence around different overlapping “systems”, which spanned the government, the legislature, the bureaucracy, street-level offices and public service associations (Göbel 2012). In this way, the distinction between formal and informal politics was nearly impossible to make.

A local political office was not very attractive in terms of political power, because the central government put strict limits on local political activities. However, a magis-tracy or mayorship provided access to local monopolies and oligopolies. In addition, it allowed factions to direct the loan decisions of the credit departments of the fishermen’s association and the farmers’ association (Chen and Chu 1992), which were colloquially referred to as “money machines”. Finally, the central government turned a blind eye to the establishment of brothels, gambling dens and karaoke bars, from which sprang further rents that could be captured. Bribery, embezzlement, nepotism and organized crime went nearly unchecked at the local level (Chao 1997). In this way, its organizational capacity and clientelistic relationship with local factions enabled the KMT to influence electoral outcomes in a way that made a KMT victory highly likely.

In sum, the KMT leadership tolerated the abuse of public office for private gain in exchange for political support, and made informal exchanges the linchpin that held the regime in place. It would not be appropriate to call this behaviour corruption, because many of these activities were neither forbidden by law, nor deemed morally repulsive at the time (Göbel 2001). Bribing was used to gain privileges and access to political posi-tions, but arguably the negative side effects of such behaviour were mitigated by the limited competition that local elections stimulated.

3.2 Corruption as an exchange between money and power in Korea

In contrast to Taiwan, where the organizational reforms in the 1950s had minimized cor-ruption at the central government level, You Jong-sung characterizes the reign of Korea’s first post-war president Syngman Rhee as having been outright predatory. In 1960, a student uprising forced Rhee to relinquish his office. Three years later, Park Chung-hee seized power from Rhee’s successor in a military coup. He and his successor, Chun Doo-hwan, engaged in regime-building to establish what is now regarded as a prototype of the “development state” (You 2005).

Korea’s developmental state was based on family-based business conglomerates such as Hyundai, Kia and Samsung, which are also known as chaebols. Although the chaebols performed very well on international markets, they were also involved in systemic politi-cal corruption, most notably by contributing to political slush funds in exchange for mar-ket access, cheap credit or favourable legislation. In contrast to Rhee’s predatory state, corruption under Park and Chun took the form of what Wedeman calls “dividend-collect-ing” (Wedeman 1997, p. 461). The political leadership depended on the competitiveness of these enterprises, so good economic performance was a baseline in these exchanges. Underperformance and criticism of the government were punished by the withdrawal of support and could even invite punitive legal action. This was the case with the head of the

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Hyundai conglomerate in 1992, who was investigated for tax evasion when he violated the informal contract with the rulers (Moon 1994, p. 159).

This coalition between business and politics was unstable. As opposed to Taiwan, where the ruling KMT managed to stay in power for more than five decades despite very unfavourable circumstances, Korea’s autocracy was far less resilient. Here, regimes came and went in a cyclical process: once in power, a new regime turned to the business sector to obtain the funds needed to placate the supporters of the regime. Corruption worsened and caused students and other social groups to protest against the regime’s increasing corruption, declining performance, and their exclusion from politics. The military then used social unrest as a pretext to overthrow the regime, and the new leaders promised to improve the situation. However, the new rulers found themselves in the same quandary as their predecessors, turned to the chaebols for funds, and set in motion a process of dele-gitimation that once more climaxed in public protests and the overthrow of the regime (Göbel 2006). In this way, political corruption was a persistent factor facilitating regime changes in Korea.

Park Chung-hee’s rule illustrates this well. After the 1960 military coup, which was legitimated with the pledge to rid Korea of corruption (Eckert and Yi 1990, p. 361), sev-eral hundred businessmen were arrested on charges of graft. Shortly after, they were set free again in exchange for the promise to support the Park regime ideationally and finan-cially (Kim and Im 2001). After this act of subjugation, Korea’s blossoming business sec-tor and the Park regime formed a relationship of mutual dependence, a phenomenon that David Kang has aptly termed “mutual hostages” (Kang 2002, p. 96 ff.). The enterprises were hostage to the government, because the business tax was so high that the chaebols had to evade it. This was intentional: the government kept track of these activities and could selectively persecute CEO’s if they violated the rules (Chon 2000, p. 71). Another disciplinary tool was the implementation or change of regulations relevant to the busi-ness sector. Policy changes or special privileges were granted in exchange for substantive donations to the president’s coffers. On the other hand, the chaebol also had consider-able leverage over the government. Korea’s financial power was concentrated in a few hands: in 1988, the combined turnover of Korea’s thirty largest conglomerates equalled 94.8 % of the country’s GNP (Business Korea, November 1989, p. 21; quoted in Moon 1994, p. 154). This gave each of them considerable political leverage. As national-level politicians had to subject themselves to elections, they needed funds to buy votes, finance pork-barrel projects and reward their supporters. After Park was shot by the chief of the Korean secret service in 1979, another military coup ensued.

Park and his successors Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo made corruption systemic. They established non-commercial foundations to which the chaebols had to make regular contributions (Kang 2002, p. 102). In this fashion, Roh amassed a fortune of 500 billion Won (approx. US$ 500 million) when he was president (1988–1993). He and his prede-cessor Chun were put to trial in 1996. Chun was sentenced to death, and Roh to a lengthy prison term. Yet only one year after, both were acquitted by presidential decree. Although the top leadership of thirty chaebols was charged with corruption, only five persons were convicted (Blechinger 2000).

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4 Institutional crisis?

In neither case was anti-corruption a matter of gradualism. In both countries, the fight against corruption was preceded by two major disruptions of the status quo with a poten-tial causal linkage both to the operation of political corruption just described and to the anti-corruption programs that were eventually implemented. The first crisis (or disruption) was democratization, and the second the coming to power of an opposition party. Unlike most other democratic transitions, these events did not converge in Taiwan and Korea.

4.1 Democratization and corruption

As the principles of democracy and political corruption are fundamentally at odds with each other, there are reasons to expect that democratization provides an opening for anti-corruption measures to be designed and implemented (Kolstad and Wiig 2011). Surpris-ingly, this was not the case in either country. Democratization did not lead to a change in the ruling elites, and elections and democratic freedom alone did not prove sufficient to jeopardize the operation of the corrupt networks established during the authoritar-ian era (Göbel 2012). In fact, although the eradication of corruption was a prominent campaign topic in the first democratic elections in both countries, the autocrat-turned-democrat regime elites could not afford to seriously fight corruption. In both Taiwan and Korea, electoral campaigns were costly. Candidates rented dozens of vehicles that blasted the population with campaign slogans, and they hosted banquets in urban and rural neighbourhoods, distributed presents and bought votes. The fact that the number of elections increased after democratization confronted political parties and their candidates with additional financial burdens.

In Taiwan, the National Assembly1 began to be elected by popular vote in 1991, the Legislative Yuan in 1992. Since 1996, the president has also been directly elected. These were added to the local elections for county councillors, majors, village heads and neighbourhood wardens, which have been held since the 1950s. In addition to national elections, in 1991 Korea also implemented local-level elections. Finally, it should be mentioned that the introduction of the rule of law deprived the executive of the means to coerce its clients into submission, which further strengthened the business sector’s posi-tion. What David Kang observes for Korea also applies to Taiwan:

Democratization does not change the business sector’s generally high demand for rents, but it does affect the supply. With more politicians competing on the supply side, fewer limits were placed on the behaviour of the business sector. […] Democ-ratization led to increased demands for political payoffs, as politicians began to genuinely compete for electoral support and to a decrease in the state’s ability to resist or contain the demands of the business sector. (Kang 2002, p. 193)

1 The National Assembly’s main powers were the election and demotion of the president, and amending the constitution. However, with the constitutional amendments of 2000 and 2005, it was successively abolished, concentrating all parliamentary power in the Legislative Yuan.

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 229

Evaluating corruption measurement data from various sources, Chilik Yu et al. even con-clude that “Taiwan’s democratic transformation has not improved but rather has blem-ished the integrity of [Taiwan’s] government” (Yu et al. 2008, p. 167).

In other words, democratization did not reduce, but increased political corruption. After democratization, the KMT’s reliance on local factions for campaigning did not stop. On the contrary, they were needed more than before, and their influence extended from the local level to the central government. In order to win elections, KMT candidates even solicited the help of organized criminals (Chin 2003).

Because of the larger number of actors in the KMT’s mobilization network, Taiwan displays a situation more complex than Korea. Given the limits of this article, only the connection between the party, local factions, enterprises and organized crime will be elaborated. To secure the continued cooperation of the local factions after the advent of democracy, the KMT gave them privileged access to government-owned land. After the liberalization of the financial sector, construction and real-estate companies entered the credit market and reaped windfall profits (Chen 1995). Using their wealth, many entrepreneurs successfully campaigned for political office, and the legislature became the playground in which real-estate magnates, local factions and financial elites peddled money for political influence. Organized crime also gained influence: In 2000, Zhu Lilun, a former KMT legislator, professor at National Taiwan University, and now mayor of New Taipei, claimed that 20 % of all Legislative Yuan representatives had connections to organized crime (Li 2000). In 1994, the former Minister of Justice, Liao Chung-hsiung, estimated that one-third of all representatives holding a seat in local parliaments were organized criminals (Hsia 1997).

Political office gave gangsters not only immunity, but also influence. A seat on the Financial Standing Committee was coveted for its kickback opportunities, gang lead-ers became conveners of the Police Administration Group and thereby formally super-vised the local police (Liao 1997, pp. 179–180). In the national legislature, criminals like Wu Tze-yuan had become members of the Judiciary Standing Committee. Lo Fu-chu, the alleged spiritual leader of Taiwan’s biggest crime syndicate, the Heaven and Earth Society, and now on the run in China, even served as one of the committee’s three con-veners. Legislators with a criminal background, some of them accompanied by armed bodyguards, even threatened individual lawmakers (Kang 1999).

To sum up, in order to win elections, politicians in Taiwan and Korea became involved in corruption. At the same time, however, corruption became one of the most important campaign topics: politicians answered public dissatisfaction by vowing to fight corrup-tion, but at the same time engaged in corrupt practices to gain access to or keep political office. Hence, political corruption in post-democratic Taiwan and Korea clearly contin-ued to be a collective action problem.

4.2 Opposition victory as a crisis in Taiwan, but not Korea

Democratization did not turn out to be enough of a crisis to facilitate sustainable anti-corruption programs in Taiwan and Korea, mainly because the authoritarian regime elites managed to stay in power. Their rule was entrenched enough for them to be re-elected in the first democratic election, not the least because they were able to afford rewarding sup-

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porters, buying votes and handing out pork. In contrast, the first electoral victory of the regime opposition did turn out to be a disruption significant enough for anti-corruption measures to be implemented. In both cases, the fact that the opposition had been excluded from the clientelist networks described above expanded the space of action of the new leadership. Neither did corruption bring them to power, nor could they be implicated in an anti-corruption campaign. Even more, anti-corruption had been a prominent campaign topic in both countries, and research shows that public dissatisfaction with increasing political corruption was a major reason for the opposition to finally gain power (Fell 2002; Solinger 2001). In the terms of the critical juncture framework, antecedent political corruption facilitated a crisis that in turn provided a space of “expanded agency” for the new leaders (Slater and Simmons 2010, p. 890).

5 Institutional change: anti-corruption in Taiwan and Korea

Upon coming to power in 2000, the main opposition party in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, used its leverage to fight political corruption resolutely. For one, it needed to deliver on its campaign promises, but more importantly, it found itself confronted with a network that favoured the well-established and wealthy KMT. Even if DPP leaders had wanted to, continuing the practices that characterized the KMT era would not have been an option. The KMT, the business sector, local factions and vote captains were so interwoven with each other that the DPP could not simply take the KMT’s place. This is even more true as the KMT retained a substantive power base in the legislature, in the bureaucracy, and in local governments. Furthermore, the DPP lacked the organisational power and the financial means to nurture these networks (2006). In this way, fighting corruption and changing the rules of the game was not only a campaign promise, but necessary for the DPP’s political survival (Göbel 2004).

This does not mean that individual DPP politicians were not involved in corrupt activi-ties. In the 1990s, several DPP legislators in local parliaments were convicted on charges of corruption, and Ko-Lin Chin found that DPP politicians and candidates had turned to factions and organized criminals for support as well (Chin 2003, pp. 154–155). Most importantly, president Chen Shui-bian was found guilty of several charges of corruption during his term in office. The difference compared to KMT corruption, however, is that these were acts of individual wrongdoing and not part of a machine that held the regime in place. Political corruption by DPP politicians was never systemic and seldom went beyond bilateral exchanges.

While the antecedent conditions in Taiwan contributed to the crisis of the KMT regime and invested the new leaders with both the incentives and means to fight corruption, they also constrained the new leadership’s possible range of action: perpetuating political cor-ruption was not an option. In Korea, the new leaders were not faced with such constraints. Korea is well known for its personalistic politics, where powerful politicians are a centre of gravity to which individuals, political parties and other political groupings are drawn (Stockton 2001). These structures are not well institutionalized and often collapse with the demise of a leading politician, only to be forged anew by his or her successor. In con-sequence, incoming leaders would find no obstacles in exchanging favours with chaebol

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 231

leaders to keep their support networks alive—for example, it would not matter which party this person came from. In consequence, opposition leaders, once in power, could choose to fight political corruption, but could also take the place of their authoritarian predecessors in cutting deals with chaebol leaders. As will be seen below, they tried to do both at the same time.

5.1 Institutional changes in Taiwan

Only two months after taking office, the DPP administration drew up a “Program for Sweeping away Organized Crime and Corruption” under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice. The program included measures to fight organized crime, combat corruption, and abolish election-related bribery. It combined efforts to enact new laws and revise exist-ing ones, as well as investigating and prosecuting corrupt behaviour, and was flanked by personnel reshuffles and government reorganization (Göbel 2004).

As for legal revisions, the Public Functionaries Election and Recall Law was to bar organized criminals from running for political office in the future, the Civil Servant Ser-vices Act was to be amended to forbid civil servants from accepting gifts or donations, and the Criminal Law was to punish repeated offenses more severely than before. In addi-tion, amendments to the Public Functionary Assets Disclosure Law was intended to make the assets of government officials and their immediate relatives transparent; the Money Laundering Control Act was to require financial institutions to report large money move-ments and establish a citizens’ bank account database; and the proposed revisions of the Anti-Corruption Penal Statue would allow the authorities to presume corruption where an official’s wealth exceeded his income level and confiscate funds the official could not account for (Göbel 2004, p. 18).

The new laws that the DPP administration proposed and that eventually were imple-mented included three Sunshine Laws, notably

● the Conflict of Interest Avoidance Law, which forbids public officials from using their position for private gain;

● the Political Contributions Act, which forbids “quid pro quo exchanges”, sets ceilings for donations to political parties, and limits the sum of anonymous donations that can be accepted;

● and the Lobby Law, which requires lobbyists to apply for a lobbying permit with the Ministry of Interior and make their lobbying activities public (Göbel 2004, p. 23).

These laws sparked considerable controversy and were resisted by KMT and independent lawmakers, but nevertheless passed the legislature in 2001, 2004 and 2008, respectively. Scandals, public pressure and the KMT’s struggle to portray itself as a clean party were probably major factors facilitating the passage of these laws. For example, the Political Contributions Law passed the legislature only two days before the 2004 presidential elec-tion. In addition, the DPP caucus proposed a Political Party Law and a Statute Regarding the Disposition of Assets Improperly Obtained by Political Parties, which were specifi-cally targeted to dry up the ample resource flows the KMT enjoyed from the state enter-prises previously under its control (Göbel 2004, p. 23). As can be expected, these laws were never implemented.

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Other measures taken by the DPP administration were efforts to dry out the irregular sources that legislators, mayors, county commissioners and local factions tapped to finance their campaigns and reward their followers. Among others, highly leveraged local financial institutions were closed down or merged, and access to funds better regulated. Besides, the allocation of public finance was centralized. For example, legislators had been able dur-ing the KMT era to “recommend” the financing of small-scale construction projects to the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, which in fact amounted to a sizeable pork barrel. Amid great protest, the DPP ended this prerogative (Göbel 2004).

5.2 Taiwan’s anti-corruption agency

An anti-corruption agency, which had been implemented with great success in Hong Kong and Singapore, was to take the lead in rooting out corruption. The new Minister of Justice, Chen Ding-nan, announced that he would form an “Anti-Corruption Task Force” by merging the Honest Government Office of the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB) with the Ministry’s Government Ethics Department (Chao 2000). However, the MJIB, during the authoritarian era the backbone of the regime’s internal security appara-tus, successfully resisted this plan, and its director was replaced by executive order (Tai-pei Times, August 15, 2003). Cooperation was thus improved, but the law establishing the “Anti-Corruption Task Force”, which would have the power to issue search warrants, seize evidence and arrest suspects, did not pass parliament. Instead, an “Organized Crime and Money Politics Investigation Center” (OCMPIC) was established in the High Court Prosecutor’s office. The OCMPIC supervised four special investigation sections in Tai-pei, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung.

Against this background, the formation of an Agency Against Corruption (AAC) in 2011 represents a major breakthrough (Office of the President 2011). The AAC works with, and in some instances overlaps with, several bodies that had been tasked with fighting and pre-venting corruption in earlier administrations. Ironically, it was established by a KMT-led government. While the KMT had obstructed many of the DPP’s anti-corruption measures, it implemented them three years after having come into office. The reason for this is the arrest of three High Court judges for having accepted bribes in return for clearing a former KMT legislator of corruption charges (Chao 2010). The popularity of the Ma Ying-jeou govern-ment was at a historical low, and the party found it difficult to shed its image of a hotbed for corruption. Since corruption was the KMT’s weak spot, it seemed logical to demonstrate credible commitment in rooting out corruption. This commitment faced a first test in April 13, when the former secretary general of the Lin Yi-shih, a close associate of president Ma Ying-jeou, was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of corruption (AFP 2013).

5.3 Institutional changes in Korea

Just like in Taiwan, Korea’s first opposition leadership took steps to honour their campaign promise to fight corruption. Anti-corruption laws were drafted, and an anti-corruption agency created. In contrast to Taiwan, however, these laws were not as rigorously enforced.

Immediately upon taking office on February 25, 1993, Korea’s first civilian president Kim Young-sam (1993–1997) set an example by disclosing his and his family’s assets to

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 233

the public. Other government officials had to follow suit, which led to the resignation of “the speaker of the National Assembly, two cabinet ministers, five vice-ministerial offi-cials, and 242 senior administrators” (Oh 1999, p. 140). One thousand three hundred and sixty-three government employees were dismissed for “evident irregularities” (Oh 1999, p. 140). Thereafter, four important laws were passed:

● the “Ethics Law for Public Officials” made asset disclosure compulsory for high-level public officials. This applied to about 1,000 people.

● the “Real Name Financial Transaction System” outlawed the registration of bank accounts under a false name. This was designed to help reducing illegal political contributions.

● the Election Malpractice Prevention Act regulated electoral campaigns and set ceil-ings for campaign spending. A presidential candidate was not allowed to spend more than 20 billion Won (about US$ 20 million) on his campaign. It was forbidden to reward campaign workers in cash, and vote mobilization by government officials was made illegal.

● the Political Fund Law raised the ceiling for political contributions by individual per-sons from 100 million Won to 150 million Won (approx. US$ 150.000) and made the reporting of such contributions to the Central Election Management Commission compulsory (Oh 1999, pp. 140–146).

The passage of these laws does not make Kim Young-sam a saint. As the Korean presi-dency is limited to one term, these regulations did not apply to him. Kim had mobilized 130 billion Won for his campaign, including significant contributions from acting presi-dent Roh Tae-woo, and his reputation was tarnished by several corruption scandals that involved both his son (Blechinger 2000) and himself (You 2005).

Another milestone was set during the administration of Kim Young-sam’s successor Kim Dae-jung. In June 2000, the Anti-Corruption Act was passed after arduous negotia-tions and intense pressure by civil society. The Act is clearly geared towards reducing political corruption, because corruption is defined as an “act of any public official’s seek-ing gains for himself/herself or for any third party by abusing his/her position or authority or violating Acts and subordinate statutes in connection with his/her duties”; and “the act of causing damages to the property of any public agency in violation of Acts and subordi-nate statutes, in the process of executing the budget of the relevant public agency, acquir-ing, managing, or disposing of the property of the relevant public agency, or entering into and executing a contract to which the relevant public agency is a party” (Anti-Corruption Act of Korea, Art. 2, § 3).

The Act specifies responsibilities for agencies, citizens, and enterprises, establishes a Code of Conduct for public officials, and regulates the newly formed Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption (KICAC), which in 2008 was replaced by the Anti-Cor-ruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC). In addition, it guarantees the protection of whistle-blowers, and allows citizens to request the inspection of suspicious behaviour.

In 2001, two more laws were passed: the Act Regulating and Punishing the Conceal-ment of Criminal Proceeds, and the Act on Reporting and Using Specific Financial Trans-action Information. Taken together, they are commonly referred to as “Money Laundering Prevention Act”, because their main aim is to put an end to money laundering. To imple-

234 C. Göbel

ment the acts, a Financial Information Unit was established under the Ministry of Finance and Economy (Korean Independent Commission Against Corruption 2006).

5.4 Korea’s anti-corruption agency

Kim Dae-jung, who became president just after the Asian Crisis, took the lead in establish-ing an organization devoted to fighting corruption. In 1998, he declared the “War on Cor-ruption”, and one year later established the Presidential Commission on Anti-Corruption (PCAC), an advisory body to the president. In 2002, the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption (KICAC) replaced PCAC as the first comprehensive anti-corruption body in Korean history. The KICAC had three major responsibilities:

● to formulate anti-corruption policies and guide their implementation; ● to mobilise the public in the fight against corruption; ● to handle reports by whistle-blowers (Anti-Corruption Act of Korea, Art. 11).

However, the KICAC was hobbled by the fact that the president appointed its mem-bers and that it lacked investigative powers. In November 2004, under Kim’s successor Roh Moo-hyun, the KICAC was strengthened through the establishment of a Corruption Investigation Office, which was specially tasked to investigate high-ranking public offi-cials suspected of corruption (Kim 2006, p. 247).

Roh’s successor Lee Myung-bak also contributed to the development of Korea’s anti-corruption regime. In 2008, the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) was formed by merging the KICAC, the Ombudsman and the Administrative Appeals Commission (Kalinowski and Kim 2013). The mission statement is not much different to that of the KICAC, except for the fact that integrity assessments of public institutions and corruption risk assessments were added to its portfolio. Just like its predecessor, the ACRC is criticized for being appointed by the president’s office, its inability to initiate investigations, and its dependence on the cooperation of other agencies in prosecuting corruption (Kalinowski and Kim 2013).

6 Implementing anti-corruption laws: diverging outcomes in Taiwan and Korea

As the preceding sections have shown, the victory of the opposition ushered in a critical juncture in both Taiwan and Korea. Compared with their predecessors, the opposition parties had incentives to fight political corruption, and their scope of agency to do so was increased as a result of the change in government. In contrast to Korea, where the opposi-tion had the choice between fighting and continuing political corruption, the Taiwanese opposition was much more constrained by antecedent conditions: they needed to fight corruption to remain in office. Hence, it is no surprise that the DPP set Taiwan on a path that was characterized by a distinct break with the past, while the Korean leaders simul-taneously fought political corruption and engaged in it.

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 235

6.1 Taiwan

Targets in the DPP’s fight against corruption were vote-buying, bribery (especially in public construction projects), judicial fraud and organized crime. The number of people brought before court on charges of corruption increased steeply after the opposition first won the presidency in 2000, and then gradually subsided to the lowest level since 1998. After Chen Shui-bian had been barely successful in his re-election bid, but was once more faced with a KMT majority in the legislature, the number of people involved in lawsuits filed with local prosecutors saw a sharp and sustained increase. When Ma took office in 2008, the activities quickly subsided. In 2010, the number of people involved in local lawsuits was the second-lowest since 1998. Following the establishment of the AAC in 2011, the numbers picked up again. Very possibly, these increases and dips mark targeted and concentrated campaigns against political corruption.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate how the number of cases, and the number of people involved in such cases, increased after the DPP implemented its anti-corruption policies. Several of these cases involved a large number of people, as the more sudden increase in indicted individuals between 2000 and 2001 illustrates. More marked, however, is the increase of the sums involved. This suggests that the prosecutors singled out major cases.

As can also be seen from Fig. 2, the years 2000–2004 saw an especially high percent-age of lawsuits against civil servants and legislators, and 2001 stands out as the year

Fig. 1: Lawsuits filed with local prosecutors (number of cases and people involved; Source: Ministry of Justice 2013a)

Fig. 2: Percentage of local lawsuits involving certain status groups (primary axis, in percent) and amount involved (secondary axis, in billion NTD; Source: Ministry of Justice 2013a)

236 C. Göbel

when most officials were sued: altogether, 1,293 politicians were targeted, 122 of which from the highest grades, and a staggering 706 from the lowest grades. Another sweep targeting high-level and medium-level officials was conducted before and during the presidential and legislative elections in 2007 and 2008, when nearly 500 high-level and medium-level officials were sued. Finally, the figure also shows that although the number of people involved in individual cases was high, the financial stakes were considerably lower than during Chen’s first term, when anti-corruption work commenced. While the cases involved an overall amount of 6 billion Yuan NTD in 2002, this sum lay below 2 billion Yuan NTD after 2007. Of the 1,063 people who were indicted in 2011, 825 were convicted, so the conviction rate is about 77.6 %. On the one hand, the number of officials who are convicted for corruption is quite high, especially in comparison to other small polities such as Hong Kong and Singapore. This shows that corruption is still a problem. On the other hand, however, the figures also show that the fight against corruption is being taken seriously.

All public officials are required to declare their assets. While this has largely been done in writing, since 2009 it has been possible to make these declarations on the Internet, and the aim is to operate the whole system online. Roughly 54,000 officials (2010: 53.724) declare their assets every year, and a random sample of nearly 8,000 declarations is drawn for in-depth examination (Fawubu Lianzhengshu 2012). Figure 3 highlights the number of cases where officials were declared guilty of deliberately forging their asset declara-tions. Again, we see an increase-decrease cycle between 2000 and 2004, and a large increase in Chen Shui-bian’s second term, peaking at 412 cases and 28 million NTD of undeclared assets. The first years of the Ma administration once more register a decrease,

Fig. 3: Guilty verdicts in asset declaration lawsuits (primary axis) and sums involved (secondary axis; Source: Ministry of Justice 2013b)

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 237

whereas the establishment of the AAC is followed by another increase. In 2012, 166 offi-cials were found guilty of deliberately submitting false declarations, and 16 civil servants were fined for failing to turn in their declarations. 16 Million NTD were recovered as a result of these operations (Fawubu Lianzhengshu 2012).

6.2 Korea

In Korea, we find the paradoxical situation of anti-corruption efforts that are improving the quality of the bureaucracy, enhancing public accountability and powerful enough to take even presidents before court, but that have been insufficient in deterring political leaders from engaging in bribery in the first place. In a recent assessment of anti-corrup-tion in Korea, Thomas Kalinowski and Soeun Kim highlight several improvements to the accountability of the Korean bureaucracy. For example, citizens can request the national audit office to investigate into suspected government corruption (Citizen Audit Request System), and an e-government platform established in 2006 even won a 2011 United Nations Public Service Award (UNPSA) for “Improving the Quality of Public Service”. Furthermore, “e-bidding” on the Internet has made public procurement far more competi-tive and transparent than before it was taken online. Accordingly, the ratings in the Open Budget Index, which measures budget transparency, have improved significantly. Of a maximum score of 100 points, Korea received only 66 points in 2008, but 75 points in 2012. Finally, the ACRC has been in a constant process of development since its estab-lishment in 2008, and was rewarded with a UNPSA award for “Preventing and Combat-ing Corruption in the Public Service” in 2011 (Kalinowski and Kim 2013).

In terms of enforcement of anti-corruption laws, the 2012 ACRC Annual Report yields a picture that is quite different from Taiwan. For example, between 2002 and 2012, alto-gether only 24,629 reports were filed with the ACRC and its predecessor, KICAC, of which 896 were referred to investigative agencies (ACRC 2013, p. 65). As shown above, local prosecutors in Taiwan handle 500 lawsuits every year. In total, “1,844 people were indicted, 1,114 people received disciplinary measures, 47 people were accused, dis-missed, or resigned, and 110 organizations received a warning” between 2002 and 2012 (ACRC 2013, p. 65). Of course, indictments are an unreliable indicator of the seriousness of the government in the fight against the corruption. However, given the fact that Korea and Taiwan have similar scores on most quantitative corruption measures, this difference is striking and could suggest that the Korean authorities are more lenient in their fight against corruption than the Taiwanese.

It might be relevant in this context that every single Korean president with the exception of newly elected Park Gyun-hee has been implicated in corruption cases. Kim Young-sam took 60 billion Won from Chung Tae-soo (You 2005), at the time chairman of the Hanbo Group, and his son was arrested for corruption. The prosecutor-general of his successor Kim Dae-jong resigned in 2002 when it became known that his brother took bribes, and half a year later, Kim Dae-jong’s sons were arrested, also on corruption charges (Lü 2003, p. 130). The Roh administration, despite having starting out promising with an election campaign that mainly drew on small-scale donations from the public, also became sub-ject to serious allegations. Some of Roh’s top aides allegedly accepted millions of dollars in illegal corporate donations, most notably from the Samsung group, but the case was

238 C. Göbel

closed when Roh committed suicide in 2009. Roh’s suicide was one of many of top politi-cians investigated for corruption. As his predecessors had done, Roh pardoned business people investigated for corruption to “protect the economy from recession” (Kim 2006, p. 249). Finally, Lee Myung-bak, who was president between 2008 and February 2013, saw “his brother, senior presidential aides and former senior officials” convicted for cor-ruption (Kalinowski and Kim 2013). In addition, he also issued special pardons to highly leveraged bribery convicts, which was met with cynicism by the public (Chang 2013).

These examples illustrate that the existing anti-corruption laws are not strictly imple-mented. At the very least, even leading politicians and businessmen do not consider being caught a risk big enough to abstain from corruption, perhaps because the risk of detection is low, and perhaps because sentences can be reduced or even suspended by presidential fiat. Kalinowski and Kim seem to confirm this assessment. They point out that

hierarchical thinking and top-down decision making processes with little account-ability remain pervasive. Personal networks and factionalism tend to trump formal institutions and a universalistic orientation. Particularly the political and economic elites largely stick to the deeply entrenched system of patronage. (Kalinowski and Kim 2013)

7 Conclusion

This study applied the “critical junctures” framework in a comparative study of corrup-tion and anti-corruption in Taiwan and Korea to gain insight into the factors that ben-efit or hinder the fight against corruption. For anti-corruption in these two cases, the critical juncture framework held more explanatory power than the gradualism theory, which holds that successful anti-corruption is a lengthy, incremental process. In addition, insights were gained regarding the relationship between antecedent conditions, crisis, and agency during the critical juncture.

The fact that a crisis does not obliterate the antecedent conditions that caused it was an important finding that demonstrates the usefulness of distinguishing between different types of antecedents, as Daniel Slater and Jessica Simmons have done (Slater and Sim-mons 2010). In Korea, the institutional structure underlying political corruption allowed politicians of the opposition to assume the role of their predecessors not only in the gov-ernment, but also in clientelist networks. They had the choice between fighting and sus-taining political corruption, and chose to do both at the same time. In Taiwan, the situation was different: here, these networks were interwoven with the well-organized KMT, and the opposition could not simply take the KMT’s place. In Korea, the financial trappings of violating campaign promises and following the examples of the disgraced predecessors was too tempting in the face of intense competition, but in Taiwan these temptations were simply absent. On the one hand, the new leaders enjoyed more options to fight corrup-tion than their predecessors, but on the other hand, their actions were constrained by the antecedent conditions that were at least partially responsible for the crisis of KMT rule.

Interestingly, the comparison also shows that a critical juncture need not lead to insti-tutional change: expanding agency means the power to not only change, but also to main-

Warriors unchained: critical junctures and anti-corruption in Taiwan and South Korea 239

tain institutions. This illustrates that institutional continuity is not necessarily the result of path dependence, but can also be consciously decided upon during a critical juncture.

As for the crisis that causes a critical juncture, it was shown that democratization is not sufficient to provide incentives for fighting corruption. Although the success stories of Singapore and Hong Kong suggest that democratization might not even be a necessary condition for political leaders to engage in anti-corruption, this was certainly not the case in Taiwan and Korea. Here, democratization prepared the stage for a change in ruling par-ties, which in turn was necessary for anti-corruption to commence.

It follows that regime changes, and even more so changes in government, can prompt critical junctures in which anti-corruption policies are implemented. However, if Taiwan and Korea can serve as guidance, anti-corruption will be more decisive where the disrup-tion produces a fundamental mismatch between the interests of the dominant political actors and the institutions that incentivize corrupt behaviour. Counter-intuitively, this is not the case when political corruption occurs in transient networks of little complexity, but when the new rulers are faced with sophisticated, complex and deeply embedded structures that make access for “outsiders” difficult.

Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their de-tailed and very helpful comments to a previous draft of this paper.

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