An Empirical Study on Anticorruption and Political Trust in China

• In Event: Corruption in China

Abstract

Corruption is endemic in the world. Lots of studies have paid attention on it. There is a corruption-trust link has been widely explored both in causes and consequences. However, an important problem has been long ignored that, what effect does anti-corruption bring? Few studies have tried to explain the political consequence from the information mechanism between the anticorruption and trust (support) link, however, some questions are still unanswered. Besides the exposure to the corruption information, the hierarchical variations in perceptions of government integrity, what else influence the public during the anticorruption campaign? Does different ranking of officials affect the public trust under the anticorruption effort background? In this article, we will further explore the mechanism between the anticorruption and trust, through the ranking variations, especially in authoritarian regimes. We start with the assumption that citizens will be affected by the bureau ranking officials in local government. We substantiate our arguments by examining one of the most intense anti-corruption drives in the world—the on-going anti-corruption campaign in China. We use a hand-collected big data on corrupt officials since from 2012 to 2015 to analyze how and why the anticorruption and trust link happened. We found that there is a positive link between the anticorruption and trust. Particularly, more bureau-ranking corrupt officials disclosed, more trust gained from the public. This result shows that ranking variation is important to influence the mechanism on anticorruption and trust in China.

Authors

• LI LI, Tsinghua University

• Yiping Wu, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics