Abstract
The research on gender and corruption has shown a positive link between the percentage of women in elected office and lower levels of corruption. This research has not focused much on the individual-level behavior of MPs but has nevertheless assumed individual-level mechanisms behind this link. Thus, there is a need to open this “black box” in order to find out whether female politicians actually engage successfully in anti-corruption efforts and to a higher extent than men. In this chapter we investigate whether female politicians have politicized corruption more often than men in election campaigns during the last twenty-five years. The results show that even though female candidates tend to politicize corruption more frequently, they rarely make it to a position powerful enough to influence policies directly.
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Notes
- 1.
The countries included are Mexico , Guatemala , El Salvador , Honduras , Nicaragua , Costa Rica , Panama , Venezuela , Ecuador , Colombia , Peru , Bolivia , Chile , Argentina , Brazil , Uruguay and Paraguay.
- 2.
Included here are thirty-one countries with a population above 100,000 that have been considered Free by Freedom House, as the correlation between female parliamentary representation and level of corruption only exists among democracies. The Central and East European countries are thus included from 1990, except for Romania , Croatia , Serbia and Montenegro , which enter the analysis in 1996, 2003, 2006 and 2009, respectively.
- 3.
In Venezuela the two major parties won more than 99 percent of the votes; so far, none of those candidates have been women. In addition, a large number of candidates take part, but they are not counted here as their votes shares are extremely small.
- 4.
Only party leaders at the time of an election has been included and only for parties that were represented in parliament before or after that election. Thus, non-parliamentary parties are not counted.
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Alexander, A.C., Bågenholm, A. (2018). Does Gender Matter? Female Politicians’ Engagement in Anti-corruption Efforts. 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_9
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