McGill Journal of Political Studies 2014 April, 2014 | Page 14

Independent Variables (IV)
IV1: Rank
Rank is the interested explanatory
variable. Rank of an official is classified
as High when his or her position is at
provincial level or above, including heads
of ministries in Beijing and CEOs of major
State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). On
the other hand, rank is classified as Low
when the position is below provincial level,
which includes numerous bureaucracies at
prefectural, county and township levels. The
definition of high and low here conforms
to the classification of high- and lowlevel corruption in the latest report by the
Supreme People’s Procuratorate mentioned
earlier. Rank is of particular interest in this
project because it captures the nuances
within the anticorruption practices, namely,
the different political utilities of investigating
and prosecuting high-level officials vis-à-vis
their low-level counterparts.

affiliation with a particular xitong can affect
how the Party handles the case in several
ways. First and most straightforwardly,
officials from some xitong (e.g. Financial
and Trade xitong) may be more prone
to the economic crimes than others (e.g.
Education and Health xitong). Secondly,
different xitong may have different weight
in the power calculation, thus it may take
the Party more time to conduct more
thorough investigations of officials from
certain xitong. Moreover, the people of
China tend to associate some xitong (e.g.
Party Affairs xitong) with the Party’s image
and legitimacy more than others, which may
result in variance of t.

14 | McGill Journal of Political Studies 2014

Model 1

IV5: Age
Age refers to the age of the official at the
time