Every policy in every field involves an intervention that has explicit and implicit ideas about the causal mechanism of the program, its context, and its consequences. Anti-corruption policies are based on positivist and interpretive epistemological assumptions. In the positivist paradigm, two theoretical approaches, good governance and political economy, and in the interpretive paradigm, two approaches, collective action theory and the plan-reality gap, are considered in the context of examining the causes of the failure of anti-corruption policies. These approaches are not without their paradigmatic components. And with their approaches, they do not have a comprehensive and sufficient view of the intervention processes, the program mechanism, the context, the neutralizing mechanisms and the causality discussion. Therefore, its alternative, the realist perspective, is introduced. The realist paradigm offers analytical combinations that are inherently integrative. The realist approach believes that the success or failure of anti-corruption policies can be examined by combining the theory of the intervention program-context-program mechanism-outcome.