Corruption, Governance Legitimacy, and Political Order in Nigeria: An Original Institutional Theory

This study develops an original institutional theory of the relationship between corruption, governance legitimacy, and political order in Nigeria, challenging existing binary frameworks that treat corruption as purely dysfunctional to governance and state stability. Corruption in Nigeria operates through complex institutional arrangements that simultaneously undermine formal governance quality and sustain informal political order, a duality that existing theoretical frameworks inadequately model. Drawing on institutional theory, political sociology, corruption studies, and recent governance legitimacy literature from 2020 to 2024, the study employs a constructivist qualitative research design. Extensive elite interviews are conducted with 80 participants comprising former ministers, senior legislators, prominent civil society leaders, business elites, and academic governance scholars across all six geopolitical zones. An interpretive policy analysis of anti-corruption architectures from 1999 to 2023 is conducted using archival and secondary sources. Critical discourse analysis and grounded theory synthesis are applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the Functional Corruption-Order Paradox Framework, which models three distinct regime types in Nigerian governance: extractive-predatory, redistributive-clientelist, and transformative-institutional corruption configurations, each producing distinct legitimacy and order dynamics. This typology advances existing theories by explaining why anti-corruption interventions that ignore political order functions systematically fail. Findings make substantive theoretical contributions to corruption studies, Nigerian political science, and broader institutional theory in developing country contexts. Keywords: corruption theory, governance legitimacy, political order, Nigeria, institutional theory