Environmental policy implementation, gender, and corruption

Beneficial influence of female representation in implementing environment-friendly policies have been documented in recent studies. However, presence of factors such as corruption and bureaucratic red tapes, known to hinder development initiatives, raises question about whether women legislators can achieve the desired level of success with environmental policies. Based on our empirical analysis using cross-sectional data for 83 countries, we find evidence that the positive impact of women in parliament on climate change policy outcomes is significant and most effective for countries with low levels of corruption. Depending on the model specification used, ranging from instrumental variable regressions to inclusion of controls to mitigate omitted variable bias, and matching models, we do find that the beneficial impact of women in parliament becomes insignificant and eventually might become negative with rising corruption. Thus, while women might be able to successfully propose a bill for and turn-into-law, environment-friendly policies in countries with low levels of corruption, the effort is nullified and might be reversed in case of countries with high corruption. We illustrate that the results are sensitive to model selection, and choice of controls.