Can Female Representation Reduce Corruption? A Meta-Analysis

Female representation in government has long been advocated for promoting good governance, and its potential effect on corruption has attracted sustained scholarly attention. Yet theoretical reasoning and evidence remain fragmented and contested. This preregistered meta-analysis, synthesizing 588 effect sizes from 57 quantitative studies, confirms a statistically significant negative association between female representation and corruption. It further shows that this effect is larger in studies using subjective corruption measures, descriptive representation, only one type of female representation, and excluding country-fixed effects. The results advance our understanding of how and when female representation influences corruption and offer insights for anti-corruption policies.