When Are People Unhappy? Corruption Experience, Environment, and Life Satisfaction in Mainland China

Abstract

Previous research on corruption and happiness has typically considered corruption perception as an indicator of government quality; however, the impact of direct personal experience of corruption has been largely overlooked. The current research, using the Asian Barometer Survey I data set on China, fills this gap. We found that the negative effects of personal experience of corruption on happiness are moderated by the general corruption environment, as measured by the corruption–victimization rate of a province. Corruption experience reduces life satisfaction significantly only when the external environment has a low level of corruption. We applied concepts from the broken windows theory to provide theoretical explanations for this phenomenon and used a series of models to test the robustness of our findings.