Why Women in Elected Assemblies Reduce Levels of Corruption: The Indirect Approach

One of the few consistent findings in corruption research is that the proportion of women in parliament is related to levels of corruption, i.e. the higher the number of women, the lower the level of corruption. This pattern appears in cross-country comparative research, but also in research comparing corruption levels at the subnational level. The reason why this pattern appears is however still a conundrum. The ambition of this paper is to develop theoretical reasoning on indirect effects that may lead to lower levels of corruption. More precisely, I suggest that an influx of women in parliament is accompanied by an influx of emphatic and other-regarding values and that the important change, leading to lower levels of corruption, is that self-regarding values, not individual men, are replaced. In order to substantiate this view I rely on data from Sweden where non-categorical measures of gender have been used to capture the mix of feminine and masculine characteristics embodied in individuals, and what these characteristics are imbued with.