Preliminary – Please do not Circulate or Cite

Numerous behavioral studies have found women to be more trust-worthy and public-spirited than men. These results suggest that women should be particularly effective in promoting honest government. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the greater the representation of women in parliament, the lower the level of corruption. We find this association in a large crosssection of countries. It is robust to the inclusion of other variables that plausibly might affect corruption. __________________________ We thank Paolo Mauro for allowing us to use his data set. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank or its member countries. Over the past couple of decades, a considerable body of work has emerged that has found systematic differences in behavioral characteristics across gender. The basic hypothesis proposed by this literature is that men are more individually oriented (selfish) than women. This has been demonstrated to be the case in a wide range of institutional contexts, through both experimental and survey-based studies. For example, women are more likely to exhibit 'helping' behavior (Eagly and Crowley, 1986); vote based on social issues (Goertzel, 1983); score more highly on 'integrity tests' (Ones and Viswesvaran, 1998); take stronger stances on ethical behavior (Glover et al, 1997; Reiss and Mitra, 1998); and behave more generously when faced with economic decisions (Eckel and Grossman, 1998). These results imply that women will be less likely to sacrifice the common good for personal (material) gain. This may be particularly relevant for the role of women in government since, almost by definition, one of the most significant difficulties faced by public bureaucracies is designing institutions that discourage their agents from acting opportunistically, at the expense of the public. Of course, governments worldwide remain male-dominated, and some political scientists and feminist scholars have cited this fact in explaining the poor functioning and lack of responsiveness of many governments (see, for example, Staudt, 1998). More to the point, increasing the direct participation of women in government could serve to mitigate these problems. In reference to the potential role of women in the Russian government, political scientist Valerii Tishkov has argued quite forcefully that "women bring enriching values [to government]." As a result, they "rarely succumb to authoritarian styles of behavior and prefer not to maintain the sort of expensive entourage which often accompanies highplaced (male) officials. Finally, the presence of women in the higher echelons of the hierarchical structures exercises an extremely positive influence on the behavior of their male colleagues by restraining, disciplining and elevating the latters’ behavior." Given the prevalence of the perceptions outlined in the preceding paragraph, surprisingly little work has been done to evaluate the underlying idea: that increased 1 Admittedly, the evidence from 'economic' experiments is somewhat mixed. However, the most recent work, cited above, gives probably the cleanest results in this area. Eckel and Grossman (1998) find that in a double-blind dictator game, women donate twice as much as men to their anonymous partners when any factors that might confound co-operation are eliminated. female participation leads to more honest government. In this paper, we make a first attempt at evaluating this hypothesis by examining the relationship between female participation in government legislatures and the level of perceived corruption in a sample of more than 100 countries. We find a strong, negative, and statistically significant relationship between the proportion of women in a country's legislature and the level of corruption, as measured by the ICRG corruption index. The paper will proceed as follows: Section I will briefly outline the data that were collected for this project; in Section II, we present our basic econometric results and their interpretation; finally, Section III contains a discussion of the results and our conclusions.