The effect of anti-corruption efforts on evaluations of governance

How do anti-corruption efforts affect citizens’ evaluations of governance? I study the case of China’s anti-corruption campaign that was unleashed in late 2012 and is still ongoing. I utilize national survey nearly representative of urban China and original data for anti-corruption inspections by the provincial discipline inspection committees in 2018. By matching respondents’ interview dates with the dates of inspections in their localities, my identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in respondents’ exposure to the anti-corruption campaign. I find that anti-corruption efforts enhance both citizens’ evaluations of specific governance items related to the control of corruption and their general evaluations of government performance. Specifically, respondents exposed to the campaign report a lower level of perceived corruption and higher satisfaction with the Chinese government’s anti-corruption efforts; the campaign also improves their latent government satisfaction, their satisfaction with the Chinese central government, and their confidence in China’s political system. Mediation analyses reveal that anticorruption efforts improve public opinion mainly because they improve citizens’ evaluations of corruption-related governance items.