Public Perceptions of Corruption in Hong Kong

Anti-corruption agencies and scholars alike agree that successful corruption preventionstrategies are greatly facilitated by securing active public support. Yet theimplementation of an anti-corruption community relations strategy is invariablyconstrained by the need to devote limited financial resources to the more immediatetasks of investigating, prosecuting and preventing corrupt activities. In many countries,as a consequence, the community relations strategy consists of little more than topdownsermons on the evils of corruption. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission AgainstCorruption (ICAC) is an exception. Over nearly forty years of community interactionthrough its decentralized local offices, it has successfully won public support for zerotolerance of corruption, defined as bribery.Yet, for two reasons, this strategy may now need refinement. First, perceptions of whatconstitutes corruption are changing rapidly from traditional notions of bribery to moresophisticated conflicts of interest, deferred advantages, money-laundering, other formsof cross-border corruption, and electoral fraud. Second, while the ICAC stronglyemphasizes and communicates a generic message of zero tolerance of corruption to thepublic, its strategy is not specifically tailored to combat socially-embedded attitudeswhich might promote corruption in some groups but not in others.The ICAC’s original in-house research between 1977 and 1986 and our more recentresearch, which includes a small pilot survey of two districts, suggest that there aresignificantly different attitudes towards corruption, broadly defined, among varioussocio-economic groups in Hong Kong. The pilot survey gives us confidence that we canmeasure these differences among socio-economic groups on three cross-checkingdimensions. We will ask our respondents how they perceive and define corruption; theirwillingness to tolerate corruption judged by their reactions to scenarios in whichbehavior might be suspected to be corrupt; and their willingness to report corruption.Our present proposal is to extend the pilot survey to 1,000 respondents. From the results,we will obtain a more comprehensive picture of corruption perceptions which will enableus to accomplish three important research objectives: to provide a compositedisaggregated picture of the experience and perceptions of corruption of different socioeconomic groups across Hong Kong; to aid in the formulation of more targeted andevidence-based policy by providing information on changing public perceptions ofcorruption; and to help in the development of more sophisticated methodologies forassessing perceptions of corruption.