Fairer Sex or Fairer Analysis? Gender, Risk, and Corruption

Scholars of the relationship between gender and corruption frequently assume that women are more risk averse than men in order to explain why women are less corrupt than men. Despite the popularity of this assumption, existing scholarship on gender and corruption lacks rigorous, large‑N testing of the relationship between risk, gender, and corruption. We reviewed the economics literature around risk and gender and the literature in political science on risk, gender, and corruption to derive hypotheses. Using the World Values Survey (49 countries), we analysed the relationship between risk, gender, and bribery (generalised linear mixed model). Unsurprisingly, respondents who perceive higher risks of being held accountable for corrupt actions engage in less corruption than respondents who perceive low risks. Yet this relationship is rather weak. Surprisingly, we found no significant gender difference for perceived risk of being held accountable for corruption, nor did we find gendered differences for the relationship between risk and corruption

There are such people:the role of corruption in the 2021 parliamentary elections in Bulgaria

Voters often express a dislike for corruption, yet on election day, they still vote for corrupt politicians. While existing research highlights the impact of information and concern about corruption on voter behavior, our novel theoretical approach integrates three elements–dislike, knowledge, and care–to better understand corruption's role in parliamentary elections. We test this framework on Bulgaria, a nation grappling with pervasive corruption. Using a commissioned survey from Alpha Research, we discover that voters who have a dislike for corruption, can identify a party as corrupt, and consider corruption when voting are significantly less likely to support a corrupt party

Territorial arrangements and ethnic conflict management: The paradox that isn’t

Ethnic civil war, the most common type of war in the 21st century, is one of the biggest challenges for development practitioners and scholars. Like other types of armed conflict, it impedes countries’ economic, social and political development, and there is no consensus on how ‘best’ to solve it. Territorial self-governance has received much attention in efforts to reduce the risk of ethnic civil war, but the academic and policy debates over its effects remain inconclusive. This has reinforced the notion that territorial self-governance is a ‘paradoxical’ institution, which either increases or mitigates the risk of ethnic civil war. In this paper, we argue that claims of a ‘paradox’ of territorial self-governance are exaggerated, as they stem from differences in empirical operationalization. We present a systematic overview of the underlying definitions, geographic and temporal scope of quantitative indicators from ten datasets, and compare how they capture aspects of self-rule, shared rule and their legal codification. Using a series of binary time-series-cross-section analyses, we illustrate that different measures of territorial arrangements lead to different results, both regarding the significance and direction of statistical effects. Our findings highlight the need to pay greater attention to the deceptively simple yet empirically fundamental question of which data are being used and why

Development, democracy and corruption: how poverty and lack of political rights encourage corruption

On average, higher per capita income comes with lower corruption levels. Yet, countries like Mexico, Libya and Saudi Arabia are relatively wealthy but experience comparatively high corruption levels. Simultaneously, countries like Madagascar or Mozambique (in the 1990s) combine poor economic development with a low level of corruption. I propose that the two most common variables in corruption research – wealth and democracy – are mutually conditional: economic development brings about a larger (and stronger) middle class that demands public goods from the government. However, citizens’ ability to influence governmental decision-making varies by political regime type. In democracies, citizens are, on average, more successful in demanding goods from the government than in autocracies. Using a large-N approach (up to 139 countries, 1984–2006), the analysis finds robust empirical support for the proposed conditional effect

Who Controls the Wealth?:Electoral System Design and Ethnic War in Resource-Rich Countries

Both natural resource wealth and electoral system design are frequently investigated factors in the civil wars literature. So far, however, there is no well-known study which explicitly considers the interaction effect between these two factors on the risk of violent ethnic conflict. We argue that resource-rich countries with a proportional electoral system for the legislature are less prone to ethnic civil war than resource-rich countries with a majoritarian or mixed electoral system, as proportional electoral systems tend to increase the effective number of parliamentary parties and thus the number of groups who can share state control over resource wealth. We find empirical support for this argument using binary time-series-cross-section analysis covering 83 to 140 countries between 1984 and 2007