From Evidence to Theory: A Grounded Theory Agenda for Corruption Research Using Global South Empirical Data

Contemporary anti-corruption scholarship faces a persistent knowledge asymmetry. Frameworks developed in Global North contexts dominate academic discourse and policy practice, while the Global South's extensive experience with corruption scandals is underutilized in theory-building. As Odilla and Tsimonis (2024) argue, there is an urgent need to address this imbalance and the lack of reflexivity in corruption studies. Many countries in the Global South have established anti-corruption frameworks, such as agencies, transparency laws, and whistleblower protections, often under pressure from international organizations promoting solutions with a pronounced "Northern bias" (Blanc et al., 2023). Despite these efforts, corruption persists, and predictable cycles follow: diagnoses of "implementation failures" (Brinkerhoff, 2000; Lawson, 2009) prompt successive waves of technical assistance, which also prove ineffective. This pattern underscores the need for methodological approaches that explain why institutions that appear formally compliant still deliver insufficient outcomes. This paper proposes a methodological agenda in three steps. First, it highlights rich qualitative data sources from Global South corruption scandals that remain underutilized for theory-building. These include judicial records from major prosecution cases, financial audit findings, investigative journalism, leaked communications, and legislative inquiry transcripts. Second, it argues for the application of grounded theory methods to analyze these materials, uncovering patterns such as exploitation of weak regulatory frameworks, normalization of elite collusion, and transnationalization of illicit flows. Third, it demonstrates strategies for operationalizing power-sensitive concepts through qualitative methods: process-tracing decision sequences and inter-institutional relationships to reveal accountability capture, network analysis to map elite influence and resource flows, comparative case analysis to identify patterns of institutional weakness, and ethnographic approaches to expose coordination mechanisms that maintain dysfunction. This methodological approach reveals what conventional quantitative measures cannot capture. Qualitative evidence from Global South contexts shows that institutional dysfunction may reflect intentional political design rather than technical incapacity. As Amundsen (2019, p. 19) notes: "By corrupt means, power holders can secure their hold by buying and manipulating public institutions of accountability and control." These methods expose how politicians coordinate across party lines and branches of government to shield illicit practices and weaken control institutions (Moreno, 2025); how economic elites capture regulatory institutions (Callais & Mkrtchian, 2024; Poblete-Cazenave, 2025); and what Odilla and Tsimonis (2024) describe as "liquid accountability mechanisms," referring to constant shifts in law creation, enforcement, and application that prevent effective oversight. The proposed methodological agenda addresses a broader epistemological challenge: moving beyond patterns where Global North frameworks define what counts as corruption and which research methods are considered legitimate. As Katzarova (2024) shows, Global South countries sought, even in the 1970s, to frame corruption as corporate abuse of power, a perspective later marginalized internationally. The growing recognition of state capture in advanced democracies (David-Barrett, 2023) suggests that corruption patterns observed in the Global South are increasingly relevant in all political systems, making this methodological agenda essential for understanding systemic corruption worldwide.