Corruption: An Uneven Field of Research—Between State and Private Topics

Fabián Belmar () and Aldo Mascareño
Additional contact information
Fabián Belmar: School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Peñalolén 8330015, Chile
Aldo Mascareño: Centro de Estudios Públicos, Santiago 7500011, Chile

Societies, 2025, vol. 15, issue 7, 1-27

Abstract: Research on state corruption has flourished since the 1990s; however, studies focused on corruption within non-state organizations are still limited. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of 18,435 articles from the Web of Science database, covering the years 2002 to 2020. Using topic modeling Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we analyzed the field of corruption research. Our analysis identified four main dimensions: state corruption as the predominant field, private-to-public corruption, private-to-private corruption, and technological–biological corruption. Our findings indicate that state corruption has a well-established research tradition, whereas private corruption remains underexplored. We highlight key conceptual limitations in understanding the mechanisms of non-state corruption and propose the idea of operational deviation from regular procedures to address these issues. This article concludes that further empirical research is needed on non-state corruption to develop a conceptual framework specific to this area, which features distinct characteristics from state corruption. Finally, we suggest implications for policy and practice based on our findings.

Keywords: corruption; state corruption; private corruption; systemic corruption; procedural expectations; self-regulation; compliance; LDA topic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/7/186/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/7/186/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:15:y:2025:i:7:p:186-:d:1694469

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().