Weakening the harm of corruption: How ruling party institutionalization mitigates the negative impact of corruption
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Pang, Min
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 26, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Vineeta Yadav, Major Field Member
Joseph Wright, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Boliang Zhu, Major Field Member
Xiaofei Lu, Co-Chair, Outside Unit & Outside Field Member
Michael J Nelson, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- Authoritarian politics
Party institutionalization
Corruption
Protest
Text as data - Abstract:
- Why does corruption spur destabilizing political protests in some autocratic contexts but not others? This dissertation argues that autocratic party institutionalization limits the destabilizing consequences of corruption via three potential mechanisms: first, party institutionalization helps to regularize the interaction between citizens and bureaucrats, which makes corruption more predictable and reduces anti-government grievance; second, party institutionalization broadens the group of citizens who benefit economically from corruption; and, finally, institutionalized party may better channels citizens’ dissent into party-led policy changes. This dissertation tests the argument and mechanisms using both cross-national and subnational analyses. The cross-national chapter develops a new measure of authoritarian ruling party institutionalization, and tests the argument using global data from 1955 to 2010. The next chapter develops a novel, subnational measure of corruption in China using Chinese-language news source from 2010 to 2015. Using this measure of corruption, and a subnational measure of party institutionalization, the next chapter examines how sub-national party institutionalization influences corruption’s impact on protests in China. The findings of cross-national and subnational analyses suggest that while corruption increases anti-regime protest in autocracies, ruling party institutionalization mitigates the effect of corruption, thus insuring local stability. The subnational analysis indicates that two mechanisms – sharing the economic benefits of corruption and channeling dissent via petitions – better explain how party institutionalization mitigates the destabilizing effect of protest than regularizing contact between citizens and bureaucrats.