Why Leaders Fight Eating and Drinking: Anticorruption Campaigns in China

Abstract

Why would an autocrat bear potential audience costs by inviting public attention to policies that are against the interests of his ruling coalition and are difficult to enforce, such as anticorruption? We argue that, among all other objectives, autocrats can signal power through these types of policy campaigns. Institutions in authoritarian regimes are fundamentally ensured by ruling coalitions’ balance of power, which draws from informal personal networks found in formal institutions. Thus, authoritarian leaders have the incentive to signal their informal power base in formal institutions because this base is not usually observable, in comparison with formal positions. Furthermore, signaling strategies vary with leaders’ informal power strength. Stronger informal power enables more aggressive signaling, for example, through intensive propaganda and by making policies explicit and visible; in contrast, weaker informal power reduces the incentive, because signaling may expose an autocrat’s power weakness. We compare Xi Jinping’s and Hu Jintao’s anticorruption/antiwaste movements in China to test our hypotheses.