Females in Parliament and Corruption

Females in the Parliament and Corruption There is still unsettled relationship between women’s representation in government and corruption. This paper aims to reveal the nature of this relationship by the instrumentality of panel data analysis. Two goals are pursued: firstly, to investigate whether females in parliaments influence corruption and, secondly, to determine the degree of this influence. Assembling data from from the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the World Bank Database for 183 countries from 1995 to 2018, we find that female MPs are less associated with the abuse of public authority at the aggregate level of analysis. Results are robust to alternative corruption measure. In addition, we find that the observed phenomenon is not the same across countries when considering the level of income and dominating religion. For example, in countries that have high income level there is no statistically significant influence of women on corruption, whereas in upper-middle income countries the strongest relationship is observed.