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Political Behavior

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06.03.2020 | Original Paper

Do Female Politicians Face Stronger Backlash for Corruption Allegations? Evidence from Survey-Experiments in Brazil and Mexico

verfasst von: Frederico Batista Pereira

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 4/2021

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Abstract

The recent world-wide trend of female chief executives struggling to maintain public support while facing corruption allegations and scandals poses the question of whether female politicians face stronger backlash for corruption than their male counterparts. Even though corruption scandals and allegations are not exclusive to countries led by female incumbents, notable figures such as former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former Chilean President Michele Bachelet seem to have experienced more dramatic drops in public support when targeted by corruption allegations in comparison to male incumbents from their region. This paper tests whether beliefs about women’s higher honesty and purity can lead voters to punish perceived transgressions by female politicians more harshly than when those are performed by men. Using survey-experiments conducted in Brazil and Mexico, the analyses find support for the gender-related backlash in Mexico and no evidence for it in Brazil. However, the backlash observed in Mexico is not larger among subjects holding views about women as less corrupt than men. Overall, the results suggest that the differential gender-related backlash against incumbents depends on individual and contextual-level factors.

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Rousseff was ultimately impeached based on charges related to illegal budgetary maneuvers, which were seen by many as insufficient reasons for removing her from office (Watts 2016).

Bachelet’s Approval Rating Drops to Historic Low. Americas Quarterly (2015, June 3). Retrieved from http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/chile-michelle-bachelet-approval-rating-drops-historic-low.

Even though Cristina Kirchner struggled with corruption perceptions during her tenure in Argentina, the main factor widely covered by the media that affected her popularity was related to the agrarian crisis (Kitzberger 2016).

Biernat and Kobrynowicz (1997) also point out that the opposite applies to objective or externally anchored evaluations. When asked to estimate the height of a pair of 6 ft. man and woman, individuals tend to rely on the stereotype that men are taller in order evaluate the man as taller than the woman.

The questions were asked in a split-sample design. Source: The AmericasBarometer by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), http://www.LapopSurveys.org.

The fact that the surveys explicitly offered the option “both” severely underestimates the gap between the options “man” and “woman.” The 2014 round of the surveys in Belize and Brazil asked the same question without the middle option, and the majority of respondents preferred the option “man.”

The data and codes for replication are publicly available in the Political Behavior Data Archive on Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GZDRRG).

Subjects who took less than 3 and more than 60 min to complete the study were screened out. A total of 56 subjects was removed in Brazil and 73 were excluded in Mexico. The average duration for the study was 13 min in Brazil and Mexico.

For descriptive statistics, see Online Appendix.

The statement read: [Name] is a city council member in a Brazilian town. [He/She] is a lawyer, married, and has two children. [Name] has over 20 years of experience in the private sector working for a variety of clients in [his/her] state. [He/She] also has experience working as a cabinet member for the mayor, and as advisor for a state chamber representative. [Name] is now on his second term in the city council, where [his/her] work has received high evaluations, and [he/she] has been awarded prizes for [his/her] competency and efficiency.

The statement read: Based on a recent report from the Political Transparency Group, [Name] was supposedly involved in financial mismanagement of public resources and illicit enrichment when [he/she] worked as cabinet member in the city hall. More specifically, [Name] was not able to justify a 450% increase in [his/her] family’s net worth while [he/she] occupied that cabinet position.

Even though this item does not come from the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, it taps into a politically relevant belief that is commonly measured in comparative surveys such as the AmericasBarometer and the World Values Survey.

The items on benevolent and hostile sexism were placed inside a 10-item battery on attitudes about democracy, race, the role of the state, and welfare recipients. The goal of this inclusion is to mock a complex environment where gender stereotypes compete against other political issues.

The positioning of the sexism items did not affect the responses to them in either country. See Online Appendix for results. Although the regression coefficients are statistically significant in Brazil, they are not significant when using the Holm–Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.

Subjects were asked three distractor questions between the treatment manipulation and the measurement of the dependent variable. Three multiple-choice questions gauged subjects’ knowledge of the politician’s profession, number of children, and number of terms served as member of the city council.

This item was also used by Botero et al. (2015) with a different response scale.

In this case, an OLS model with an interaction term between the treatment condition is equivalent to the difference-in-differences framework. The analyses were performed in Stata 13.1.

With the exception of the question about the left–right self-placement, which used sliders from 1 to 10, all other questions for the control variables used drop down or radio buttons. The phrasings and responses options were based on the standard questions used and validated in both countries by the AmericasBarometer survey (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/).

See Online Appendix for results.

See Online Appendix for the full model estimates for all results reported in this section.

Given that the difference is close to null, this finding is not related to statistical power.

The difference is still statistically significant within the Mexican sample after applying the Holm–Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. The difference is significant at 0.06 with the removal of the control variables.

The results observed in Fig. 2 do not vary at a substantive or statistically significant level based on the subjects’ sex in both countries.

The interaction term is in the expected direction and the statistical power is .66, indicating that the estimate could be significant with a larger sample size. However, the analyses do not correct for multiple comparisons, and therefore it is unlikely that the null findings are related to lack of statistical power.

In Mexico, there is support for Hypothesis 2 among male but not among female subjects, which raises the possibility that benevolent sexism may interact with in-group bias (see Online Appendix for full results. Exploring this ad hoc result is out of the scope of this paper.

Kerevel and Atkeson (2015) find that being currently governed by a female mayor in Mexico reduces “negative” stereotyping among males. However, their findings do not speak to how that could have increased the reliance on benevolent stereotypes, which would be consistent with the proposed interpretation.

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Titel: Do Female Politicians Face Stronger Backlash for Corruption Allegations? Evidence from Survey-Experiments in Brazil and Mexico
verfasst von: Frederico Batista Pereira
Publikationsdatum: 06.03.2020
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09602-9

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