Abstract
Schwindt-Bayer, Esarey, and Schumacher evaluate whether voters perceive of comparable male and female candidates differently in terms of how likely they are to be involved in a corruption scandal and punish them differently when they are involved in corruption. We conducted survey experiments in two countries, the United States (with high electoral accountability) and Brazil (with moderate to low electoral accountability), to determine if differential treatment is the causal mechanism linking women’s representation and corruption. We find only weak and statistically uncertain evidence that citizens perceive women as less corruptible than men in both countries, and we find no evidence that they punish women more harshly than men for corruption scandals.
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Notes
- 1.
Both experiments received human subject approval from the Rice University Institutional Research Board (IRB). U.S. experiment: study number IRB-FY2017-332; Brazilian experiment: study number IRB-FY2016-607.
- 2.
The U.S. scored 22 on the 2015 Freedom House Freedom of the Press ranking indicating that its press is “free.” It scored a 74 out of 100 (100 = clean) on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index in 2014, ranking it the 16th cleanest government out of 167 countries. On Johnson and Wallack’s (2005) personalism index, it scored a 10 out of 13, with 13 being the most personalistic.
- 3.
Respondents in this survey could choose to leave this or any other question blank.
- 4.
Drawing from the language used in the National Election Study, the question asked for a respondent’s “gender,” not “sex.” Thus, we use “gender” to discuss this question and the findings in this section. The Brazilian experiment, by contrast, asked for a respondent’s “sex.”
- 5.
Respondents could select from one of the following categories: less than high school degree; high school graduate (high school diploma or equivalent including GED); some college but no degree; associate degree in college (two-year); bachelor’s degree in college (four-year); master’s degree; doctoral degree; professional degree (JD, MD).
- 6.
Respondents could select among the following categories, including the possibility of selecting multiple options: White/non-Hispanic, Black or African-American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian , Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or Other. The number of respondents who reported being Pacific Islander, Native American, or Other was so small that we classified all such responses as being in a combined “Other” category to use in our analyses. Because these are not mutually exclusive categories, Appendix Table 4.1 reports coefficients for all categories.
- 7.
Respondents reported their state of residence. We then classified states as being in one of four regions: North, Midwest, Southeast, and West.
- 8.
Respondents could select from one of the following four categories: very interested, somewhat interested, not very interest, and not interested at all.
- 9.
Specifically, we employ difference of proportions tests using prop.test in R (R Core Team 2017). The chi-square values on which the difference of proportions tests is based use the Yates’ continuity correction, which is the default in R.
- 10.
The Brazilian survey experiment was conducted in Portuguese. The translated prompt is the following: “Imagine you live in a neighborhood like yours, but in a different state. In that state, a [man/woman] from a moderate party (neither extreme right or extreme left) was just elected governor. In the past, the state [has never had a female governor/has had a female governor]. The new governor promises to create jobs, improve access to healthcare and education and fight crime and corruption. [His/Her] approval ratings are fairly high, and [he/she] has strong support from many citizens in the state.” The prompt described the governor as “moderate” to downplay the significance of party ideology. In Brazil, the main cleavage among parties is not left-right, but whether the party supports the executive party in power, so the experiment aimed to minimize party ideology in the prompts (Samuels and Zucco 2014).
- 11.
Social class is rated on a six-point scale, with 1 = upper class and 6 = lower class. In our sample, the lowest category had no respondents in it.
- 12.
Respondents could select from the following categories: north, northeast, southeast, south, and central west.
- 13.
The race and political interest questions were: (1) Do you consider yourself white, black, brown, indigenous or yellow? (with respondents selecting only one of these categorical options or “other”), and (2) How interested are you in politics? (with answers on a four-point ordinal scale from “very interested” to “not interested at all”). Unlike the U.S. experiment, respondents in the Brazilian experiment could choose only one racial category; thus one category (white) is excluded in the analyses of Appendix Tables 4.2 and 4.3.
- 14.
The sex distribution across treatment groups was the following (male–female): Male governor, no history: 55.2–44.8 percent; Male governor, history: 44.1–55.9 percent; Female governor, no history: 49.8–50.2 percent; Female governor, history: 51.0–49.0 percent. The chi-square test for independence was statistically significant at conventional levels (p = 0.0193) as a result of the sex distributions in the two groups given the male governor treatments not being well balanced. We also found some evidence of imbalance in whether subjects answered both manipulation checks correctly: a chi-square test for independence of treatment and manipulation checks was statistically significant (p < 0.001), with the largest difference being an apparent excess of those answering both questions correctly in the “no history, female” treatment. Finally, we found evidence of imbalance in whether subjects were thinking of a specific state or politician (discussed in the next paragraph): a chi-square test for independence between treatment and this question was statistically significant (p = 0.007), with respondents in the female governor treatments being more likely to be thinking of a specific state or politician than men.
- 15.
For details on Netquest’s Brazilian panel characteristics, see www.netquest.com/papers/panelbook_en.pdf, page 3.
- 16.
Note that there is no statistically significant gender difference in whether respondents got the manipulation questions correct. Sixty-six percent of women got both questions correct as did 64 percent of men (chi-squared test for difference of proportions p = 0.285).
- 17.
Specifically, in a linear regression predicting corruptibility , a multiplicative interaction term between (a) a dummy identifying subjects who were thinking of Dilma Rousseff and (b) the female governor treatment is statistically insignificant for all subjects, subjects in the condition with a history of a female governor, and subjects in the condition with no history of a female governor.
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Schwindt-Bayer, L.A., Esarey, J., Schumacher, E. (2018). Gender and Citizen Responses to Corruption among Politicians: The U.S. and Brazil. In: Stensöta, H., Wängnerud, L. (eds) Gender and Corruption. Political Corruption and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70929-1_4
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