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How corruption investigations undermine regime support: evidence from China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2021

Yuhua Wang Open the ORCID record for Yuhua Wang [Opens in a new window]  and
Bruce J. Dickson
Yuhua Wang*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Bruce J. Dickson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Authoritarian leaders around the world often fight against corruption in an effort to win public support. Conventional wisdom holds that this strategy works because leaders can signal their benevolent intentions by removing corrupt officials. We argue that fighting against corruption can undermine regime support. By revealing scandals of corrupt officials, corruption investigations can alter citizens' beliefs about public officials and lead to disenchantment about political institutions. We test this argument by examining how China's current anti-corruption campaign has changed citizens' public support for the government and the Communist Party. We analyze the results of two original surveys conducted before and during the campaign, and employ a difference-in-differences strategy to show that corruption investigations, at the margin, suppress respondents' support for the central government and party. We also examine our respondents' prior and posterior beliefs, and the results support our updating mechanism.

Keywords

Asian politicscomparative politicsdeveloping countriespublic opinion
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 33 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Wang and Dickson Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DBA7TB
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