Bureaucrats' Perception of Corruption and Political Trust in South Korea

This article examines how government officials' perceptions of corruption affect the evaluation of government effectiveness and political trust and whether the outcomes are different from ordinary citizens. On the one hand, one may expect that bureaucrats share with citizens the belief that perceptions of corruption harm their evaluations of government effectiveness and trust in government because they are also members of the society. On the other hand, bureaucrats may be more tolerant of corruption than ordinary citizens because, while the latter are victims of corruption and therefore express negative judgments of it, the former are possible beneficiaries. Through the empirical analysis of data collected in South Korea, the article suggests that bureaucrats' perceptions of corruption lower their evaluations of overall government effectiveness and trust in government institutions. Although bureaucrats' job-related factors bring nuances in terms of those causal relations, the overall outcomes affirm previous studies of the high corruption-low trust linkage among ordinary citizens.