“打老虎”如何影响公众腐败感知差异？: 基于广东省的准实验研究

The topic of "perception of corruption"has become popular among scholars and practitioners in recent years. Integrity managers must make clear the relationship between anti- corruption efforts and the public perception of corruption. In the extant literature,there is no inquiry on how anti- corruption efforts affect public perceptions of corruption. This paper investigates how the public’s perception of corruption changes when leading cadres are found to be corrupt. This study uses the corruption investigations of two Municipal Party Committee Secretaries in Guangdong Province in 2014 as a case. Using a propensity score matching model,we find that compared to those citizens living in a city where their "first in command"was not investigated,those citizens whose "first in command"was investigated will on average perceive the level of corruption to be 2. 3( range 0- 100) higher. This is primarily because the public does not necessarily see the investigation of a Municipal Party Committee Secretary as a signal of increased anti- corruption efforts but rather just the rise of corruption itself. This finding contributes to determining the appropriate factors leading to bias in corruption perception,which are important both theoretically and practically