Revisiting the Gender/Corruption Link: Do Women Attribute Higher Importance to Honest Elections?

A growing literature evidences a rather strong link between higher levels of gender equality and lower levels of corruption. A large body of this research evaluates the link through a focus on the impact of women’s inclusion in political-office holding. Few studies turn to the analysis of mass attitudes for greater understanding of this relationship. And, yet, the field gains key insight from this research. One of the path-breaking pieces of research in the field of gender and corruption, Swamy et al. (2001), evaluated gender differences in support for bribe-taking with global public opinion data as key micro-level evidence for bolstering assumptions of women’s political office-holding and lower corruption. An additional piece of recent research, Stensöta et al. (2014), found gender differences in voting for a corrupt political party in European countries with more expansive welfare states and concluded that women’s greater likelihood to combat corruption as voters may be conditional on the extent to which the state supports women’s interests. This paper works with global public opinion on the importance attributed to honest elections from the most recent wave of the World Values Surveys to further test the gender/corruption link, mechanisms underlying the link and factors on which the link may be conditional. I use cross-sectional, multi-level analyses to evaluate the link between gender and support for honest elections.