Abstract
As corruption affects people in all walks of life, public reactions to corruption and citizens’ views of the government’s anti-corruption effort are critically important. Any government seeking to make effective policy against corruption must obtain public trust and support, which provides the much-needed legitimacy for policy enforcement. In this study, we drew on a survey of 1,604 randomly selected residents in Shanghai in 2008 to examine the perceptions and attitudes of Chinese citizens towards the government’s anti-corruption effort. Specifically, we focussed on the “sense of anticorruption efficacy,” defined as people’s expectation for positive anti-corruption outcomes. We addressed two questions. To what extent the public was confident in the government’s anti-corruption efficacy? What factors explained the variation in people’s perceptions of anti-corruption efficacy? Results indicated that two salient factors could affect an individual’s sense of anti-corruption efficacy. First, as corruption contributed to social disparity, the perceived unfairness of income distribution exacerbated people’s expectation for anti-corruption efficacy. Secondly, an accepting attitude towards power intrusion into income distribution diluted the positive impact of the perception of unfair distribution on people’s expectation for anti-corruption efficacy. We take from the results that to what extent people expect the government to make effective effort to control corruption is determined by both economic and political factors. People develop high expectation for anti-corruption reform when they are unhappy not only with the lack of fairness in income distribution but also with the intrusion of political power into economic affairs which, if unconstrained, often gives rise to corruption.
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Notes
This survey was conducted by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in Shanghai in 2008.
For more information about CPI, please retrieve its official website: http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/ (accessed 23 June 2014).
We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this point.
For an introduction about PPS, please refer to Srivastava and Singh (1981).
See, for example, Kish (1949) for more information about Kish grid.
The age range was set by the original survey, presumably because some survey questions concerned employment and income. The age variable has no impact on our study.
In statistics, the ordered logit model is a regression model for ordinal dependent variables. For more detail, see Long and Freese (2006).
The scales were set by the original survey based on the nature of questions. See Croasmun and Ostrom (2011) for more information on Likert scales.
It should be noted that we measured this variable in a relative term. Our rationale is that people may think the same regarding the former question while their answers to the latter question are different. Thus, these respondents may have different perceptions of unwarranted political influence. By adopting a relative measure, we expect to solve this problem.
Arithmetically, we were expected to get a variable ranging from −4 to 4. However, our data only observed 3 as the largest value. It means that no respondent thought political power should make a “very significant difference”(4) in income distribution.
See, for example, Sun Liping, Walking out of the Transition Trap, The Economic Observer: www.eeo.com.cn, 24th Feb. 2012. Details are available at: http://www.chinainnovations.org/Item/35264.aspx (accessed 6th Sept. 2013).
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This research presents the initial results of the project supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC, Grant No. 11CZZ015). The project is supported by the Social Science Youth Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 10YJC810022) and The National Social Science Fund of China (No. 13 & ZD011). The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Economic & Social Research Council, and City University of Hong Kong for the research (City U 143210, 11402814 & 7004097). We thank Pan Dawei for offering the data and Zhu Yan, Sun Ming, and Queenie Deng for their research assistance.
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Li, H., Gong, T. & Xiao, H. The Perception of Anti-corruption Efficacy in China: An Empirical Analysis. Soc Indic Res 125, 885–903 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-0859-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-0859-z