Voting Women, Protesting Men: a Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation

Abstract

Previous studies have been unable to establish the link between corruption perceptions and political participation. This is partly due to a disregard of different types of political participation, ignoring gender differences in how corruption perceptions affect political participation, and overlooking the importance of context. We therefore here examine gender differences in the links between corruption perceptions and three types of political participation: voting, institutionalized participation between elections, and noninstitutionalized participation between elections. We also examine how the context in the form of the national level of corruption affects these linkages. The data come from International Social Survey Program Citizenship II and includes 31 democracies, analyzed with multilevel regression models. Our results show that women become more likely to vote when faced with corruption, whereas men become more likely to engage in elite-challenging forms of participation when faced with corruption while women remain unaffected.