Purifying the Leviathan: The Strategic Dilemma of an Anti-Corruption Campaign Under One-Party Rule

Motivated by the recent anti-corruption campaign in China, this article develops a theory of corruption governance, in which political leaders face a strategic dilemma between boosting economic performance and maintaining officials’ loyalty to the regime. Corruption increases economic rent, which is necessary for maintaining the ruling coalition; however, corruption also erodes popular support for, and officials’ loyalty to, the regime. Political leaders may switch from a permissive model to a punitive model of corruption governance when the institutional loophole and accumulated social grievances due to corruption pose a sufficiently severe threat to the regime. These theoretical predictions are consistent with the empirical evidence of changing patterns of bureaucratic selection, anti-corruption investigations, and machine learning–based analysis of the annual work reports of city governments.