Women and Corruption

• Main Author: Holmgren, Veronika
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Sociologiska institutionen 2015
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-117659

In this paper, two assumptions about corruption levels are examined, theoretically explained and empirically tested for. The first assumption is that a higher percentage of women in the lower house in countries would decrease the level of corruption in a country. The meaning of “lower house” are in example the parliament and ministries, depending on how the country’s government looks like. If the country is governed with a parliamentary system, the lower house represent the parliament in itself and the ministry’s that comes with it and if the country is governed with a presidential system the lower house is seen as the second chamber and the institutions that goes with the chamber. The second assumption is that a country who is governed democratically would also have lower corruption levels. These assumptions are explained by studies and theories from de Beauvoir (1973), Harris and Jenkins (2006), Rudebeck (2013) and Rothstein (2014) amongst others. To examine the outcome, a cross-sectional dataset from the Quality of Government Institute is used and the results are shown in three models. The results show that if tested for nothing else than the percentage of women in the lower house and democracy levels, they both have a positive impact on corruption levels in countries, in other words reduce predicted corruption levels, but with a low variance explained in the dependent variable. When checked for other factors, such as an anti-corruption laws, the effects of women in lower houses becomes insignificant and democracy goes from giving a positive impact to giving a negative impact. This is probably because the anti-corruption laws becomes an intermediate variable and thus take most of the effect from the other two variables.