“Big Tigers, Big Data”: Learning Social Reactions to China's Anticorruption Campaign through Online Feedback

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12866
• Author: Dong Zhang,Huang Huang,Jiangnan Zhu
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Published date: 01 July 2019

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 4, pp. 500–513. © 2017 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf

of American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12866.

500

“Big Tigers, Big Data”:

Learning Social Reactions to China’s Anticorruption

Campaign through Online Feedback

Dong Zhang is assistant professor at

Lingnan University. His research interests

include political economy of development,

authoritarian politics, corruption and

governance. He has published in

Governance

and

Comparative Political

Studies

.

E-mail: dongzhang@ln.edu.hk

Huang Huang is associate professor

in the School of Government at Peking

University and visiting associate professor in

Macao Polytechnic Institute. He is interested

in Chinese public policy, e-governance, and

social simulation.

E-mail: huanghuang@pku.edu.cn

Jiangnan Zhu is associate professor

of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the

University of Hong Kong. She is interested

in comparative political economy, especially

corruption and anticorruption in China. She

has published in multiple journals, including

Comparative Political Studies, Governance,

and the

Journal of Contemporary China

.

E-mail: zhujn@hku.hk

Jiangnan Zhu

University of Hong Kong

Huang Huang

Peking University and Macao Polytechnic Institute

Dong Zhang

Lingnan University

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

Abstract: This article examines the effect of campaign-style anticorruption efforts on political support using the case of

China ’ s most recent anticorruption drive, which stands out for its harsh crackdown on high-ranking officials, known

as “big tigers.” An exploratory text analysis of more than 370,000 online comments on the downfall of the first 100

big tigers, from 2012 to 2015, reveals that public support for the top national leader who initiated the anticorruption

campaign significantly exceeded that afforded to anticorruption agencies and institutions. Further regression analyses

show that support for the leaders with respect to intuitions increased with the tigers ’ party ranking. Findings suggest

that while campaign-style enforcement can reinforce the central authority and magnify support for individual leaders,

it may also marginalize the role of legal institutions crucial to long-term corruption control .

Evidence for Practice

• Public support is an important indicator to monitor during anticorruption campaigns, in addition to

corruption control.

• To comprehensively understand public opinion, it is necessary to separate political support into multiple

dimensions.

• Anticorruption campaigns can generally help boost public support, especially support for top leaders.

• Policy makers ought to wield authority amassed through the campaign to promote institution building in

order to achieve desired policy outcomes in the long run.

Corruption has detrimental effects on both

economic well-being (Liu and Mikesell 2014 ;

Liu, Moldogaziev, and Mikesell 2017 ; Rose-

Ackerman 1999 ) and public trust in government

(Seligson 2002 ; Villoria, Van Ryzin, and Lavena

2013 ). Previous research has examined a wide array

of anticorruption strategies, such as increasing

government transparency (Brunetti and Weder 2003 ;

Cordis and Warren 2014 ), streamlining and reforming

government (Goel and Nelson 1998 ; Neshkova and

Kostadinova 2012 ), building strong anticorruption

agencies (Klitgaard 1988 ; Quah 2011 ), and improving

bureaucrats ’ quality and integrity by promoting civil

servants ’ material incentives and intrinsic motivation

(Azfar and Nelson 2007 ; Perry 1996 ; Perry and

Hondeghem 2008 ). These measures are conducive to

the quality of long-term governance. However, their

implementation is often accompanied by difficulties

such as a paucity of resources, information asymmetry,

and institutional inertia (Wedeman 2005 ). Thus,

political leaders, especially those in the developing

world, often resort to less institutionalized means,

in particular anticorruption campaigns, to fight

corruption.

Driven by strong political will and often bypassing

formal legal institutions, anticorruption campaigns

tend to feature temporary intensive enforcement, such

as revealing outrageous corruption cases and cracking

down on high-ranking officials. Thus, eliminating

corrupt officials tends to be presumed as the primary

goal of campaigns. However, the broader sociopolitical

repercussions of such campaign-style enforcement are

often overlooked. In fact, governments usually launch

anticorruption campaigns not only to curb corruption

but also to gain legitimacy and win political support

(Gillespie and Okruhlik 1991 ). When corruption is

serious and governments are in a trust crisis, political

leaders are especially prone to look for quick solutions

to recover public confidence. For example, Indonesia

launched several corruption eradication campaigns to

legitimize Suharto ’ s regime (Quah 1999 ). The Korean

government also resorted to anticorruption campaigns

to rebuild trust in government, which has declined in

recent years (Yi 2015 ).

This article seeks to understand the extent to which

anticorruption campaigns win public support, which

is a critical factor for good governance and political

Research Article