Abstract: By making use of the 2015 CGSS survey data, this paper studies the impact of corruption perception on individual subjective well-being and its mechanism of action. The findings show that: (1) corruption perception has a negative impact on the subjective well-being of residents; when corruption perception reaches the medium level of corruption, individual’s happiness will be significantly reduced; (2) the regression result of the mediation effect model shows that the corruption perception can significantly impact residents’ subjective well-being through affecting the three paths of social security satisfaction, government trust, and the feeling of unfair income distribution, of which the impact on social security satisfaction is the most important; (3) there are heterogeneous in the impacts of these three mechanisms for different social strata: the impact on the subjective well-being of lower-level social groups is significant, while on the happiness of middle and higher-level social groups is not significant enough. The above conclusions indicate that the government should continue fighting against corruption and focus on strengthening anti-corruption in areas related to social security services, which can help to improve the happiness of our residents.

Key words: corruption; subjective well-being; mediation effect model; social security satisfaction