How Factional Ties Explain Different Anti-Corruption Outcomes in China and Vietnam

📊 Data Used: Disciplinary Investigations in Two Communist Parties

A new dataset of disciplinary investigations within the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties is used to compare how authoritarian leaders manage the trade-off between deterring rent-seeking and keeping factional allies loyal. The analysis exploits variation across provinces and factional connections to traced patterns of protection and punishment.

🔎 The Mechanism Tested: Factional Malleability Shapes Protection Choices

Factional malleability—how much a regime’s factions are built on flexible personal ties—conditions which protection strategy the leader chooses. Two contrasting methods are evaluated:

• Ex post protection: delayed or lenient punishment for investigated officials.
• Ex ante protection: exclusion of some officials from investigations altogether.

Under rigid factions, allies face a non-credible defection threat; leaders therefore prefer ex post protection, which is more valuable to the leader than to his subordinates, and show this by giving delayed, lenient punishments to investigated officials in factionally connected provinces. Under malleable factions, allies can credibly defect, so leaders instead offer ex ante protection by removing the same officials from investigation.

✅ Key Findings and Why It Matters

• Authoritarian rulers tailor political protection to their followers rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Factional malleability moderates whether protection is provided before investigations (ex ante) or after (ex post).
• In China (rigid factions), protection appears as delayed, lenient sanctions for officials in factionally connected provinces.
• In Vietnam (malleable factions), protection appears as exclusion from disciplinary investigations.

These results explain how regimes with similar formal institutions can produce divergent anti-corruption outcomes by varying the form of political protection based on factional structure.