Women's political representation, good governance and human development

Abstract

As women's political inclusion has become the international norm, many countries have implemented gender quotas or actively tried to increase women's political representation. Women's inclusion is also expected to bring positive development outcomes, as women, both as voters and politicians, may prioritize policies conducive to development. Yet, previous research has shown that descriptive representation does not automatically improve governance, and that various contextual factors influence (female) politicians' ability to shape policy outcomes. In this article, we examine how political corruption affects the dynamics of women's representation. We argue that while the presence of women in politics has the potential to increase development, it can also be used as “window-dressing” to legitimize rule where in reality male patrons continue to dominate policy decisions. Thus, women representatives recruited from the same corrupt networks as these male patrons may be used to perpetuate the status-quo or even decrease development outcomes. Building on previous research, we argue that patriarchal gender norms and relatively weaker standing of women in corrupt environments can explain why women in these societies may support policy decisions that go against their preferences and interests as a group. We conduct a quantitative analysis drawing on time-series cross-sectional data on 182 countries from 1900 to 2014 to shed light on the linkage between women empowerment, corruption, and development. We find that women's representation only promotes human development if corruption is at low levels, while under high level of corruption women's inclusion is associated with worsened development outcomes. This finding suggests that women political empowerment might not always be a silver bullet to increasing substantive representation, and especially not under very poor levels of governance and prevalent corruption.