Can female legislators reduce corruption when corruption is self-reinforcing?

Evidence suggests that the presence of women in politics reduces corruption. However, this empirical regularity seems at odds with research insisting corruption is self-reinforcing and exhibits multiple stable equilibria. Here, we bring together these two research traditions. To do so, we propose a theory of gender and corruption that operates through negative externalities; the idea being that the presence of female legislators reduces the expected payoffs to corruption that accrue to members of the public considering whether to bribe a public official. A key feature of our argument is that it can predict falling corruption with rising women’s seat share in the national parliament even when corruption is self-perpetuating. After presenting the model, we also show how the externalities approach makes novel predictions about the duration of the effects and raises questions about how much efficiency can be gained when reducing corruption by increasing women’s legislative seat share.