Corruption Experience and Public Perceptions of Anti-corruption Crackdowns: Experimental Evidence from China

Are citizens’ attitudes towards government’s effort to fight corruption primarily shaped by social information (such as public media and political knowledge) or direct personal experience of corruption? Using a list experiment embedded in national survey to measure corruption experience in China, this paper provides a nuanced comparison of these two factors. Compared with social information, the experience of corruption enhances the perceived corruption while reduces the positive evaluation on government’s anti-corruption effort. However, regarding public feedback to anticorruption endeavours, the effect of corruption experience could be mitigated by people’s satisfaction on basic public services provision. The findings suggest that individuals’ evaluation of anti-corruption campaign is very utilitarian. When people obtains better public services from government, they are more likely to enhance positive evaluation of anti-corruption performance.