The title of the presentation: "Are women MPs more concerned about corruption than men? A comparative analysis of the written parliamentary questions in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom".
The paper is co-authored with Amy C. Alexander and Andreas Bågenholm.
Abstract
The research on gender and corruption has shown a positive link between the percentage of women in elected office and lower levels of corruption. Until now, however, this research has not focused much on the individual-level behavior of MPs but has nevertheless assumed individual-level mechanisms behind this link. Thus, there is a need to open this "black box" in order to find out whether female politicians actually engage in anti-corruption efforts and to a higher extent than men. In this paper, we do this by analyzing the written questions on corruption posed by Belgian, British, Italian, French, German, Spanish and Swiss MPs to members of the government during the last full mandate periods with the aim to find out whether female MPs are more active in bringing up the issue of corruption than their male colleagues. Based on assumptions in the gender and corruption literature, we hypothesize and test whether female MPs ask relatively more questions about corruption than male MPs. We use negative binomial regressions to test the data and find no gender effect.