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Journal of Happiness Studies
Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies 3/2016

17-04-2015 | Research Paper

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

Authors: Yiping Wu, Jiangnan Zhu

Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies | Issue 3/2016

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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.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
The 2008 and 2013 ABS do not include questions on life satisfaction.
 
2
Recent research has investigated the happiness of subgroups of the Chinese population; for example, Zhang and Tsang (2013) examined urban Chinese women's marital happiness and Chyi and Mao (2012) examined Chinese elderly people's happiness. Because our survey data set does not include detailed data on these subgroups, we did not include these control variables.
 
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Metadata
Title
When Are People Unhappy? Corruption Experience, Environment, and Life Satisfaction in Mainland China
Authors
Yiping Wu
Jiangnan Zhu
Publication date
17-04-2015
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Happiness Studies / Issue 3/2016
Print ISSN: 1389-4978
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7780
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9635-7

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