Are Women More Resistant to Corruption? A Large-Scale Survey Experiment

• In Event: The Link between Gender and Political Corruption

Abstract

Are women more resistant to corruption than men? Following up on a prior laboratory experiment, we conduct a large-scale survey experiment on 3000 U.S. adults to investigate whether there is a link between gender and corruption. Our experiment investigates the propensity of survey respondents to appropriate public goods for individual gain. It asks participants to make a choice about whether and how much money to take for themselves from a pot of money set aside for a charity organization (described in a vignette). In half of the scenarios, respondents face no chance of being caught for taking money, whereas in the other half, there is a sliding scale of the probability that a respondent may be caught taking money, depending on how much they take from the $1.00 available to them to appropriate for themselves. We then evaluate whether there is a difference in the proportions of women and men who appropriate money for their own gain and whether that varies depending on the riskiness of the scenario. The survey experiment will allow us to determine whether any link between gender and corruption is attributable to differential risk aversion and/or gender differences in moral attitudes toward corruption, two common theories for why women may be less likely to engage in corruption than men. This study contributes to a growing literature on why a relationship between women’s representation in government and corruption may exist.

Authors

• Justin E. Esarey, Wake Forest University

• Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer, Rice University