Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2017, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (6): 194-215.

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Corruption Experience and Corruption Perceptions:Comparing Evidence from List Experiment and Direct Questioning

LI Hui1, MENG Tianguang2   

  1. 1. Department of Political Science, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University;
    2. Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University
  • Online:2017-11-20 Published:2017-11-20
  • Supported by:

    The research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (No.15CZZ036),Outstanding Scholar Plan of Fudan University(No.IBH3056003),and Research Center on Data and Governance,Tsinghua University

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Abstract:

From 2012, Chinese government initiated a brand new anticorruption crackdown. This time, Chinese people witnessed a very different anticorruption campaign both from enforcement and institutional design. How does Chinese citizen evaluate this new anticorruption crackdown? In conventional wisdom, scholars mainly utilize two indirect factors to explain corruption perceptions and evaluation of anticorruption:information access and personal economic status. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and attitudes of Chinese citizens towards the government's effort to fight corruption. Specifically, we focus on the "corruption experience", defined as citizens' engagement of gift-giving toward government officials for private considering. We assume that, comparing to the respondents without any experience of corruption,the one who has experienced corruption, could perceived government more corrupt and has weaker capacity to control corruption. Our measurement of corruption experience is based on list experiment survey questionnaires to solving social desirability bias problem. The findings suggest that corruption experience may exert considerable influence over an individual's view of corruption and anticorruption endeavor of Chinese government. Our findings further reveal that the corruption experience's impact is various between local and central government.

Key words: corruption experience, list experiment, corruption perception, anticorruption satisfaction