Gendered Clientelism and Corruption: Are Women Less Corrupt than Men in China?
By: Tu Wenyan and Guo Xiajuan
Are women less corrupt than men? The World Bank’s influential policy research report on gender equality suggests that greater representation of women in public life leads to a lower level of government corruption. Many governments are currently integrating more women into public sectors as a potential anti-corruption strategy, such as Peru, Ghana, and Mexico.
The relationship between gender and corruption has been heated debated. Some believe that engaging more women in the public sector may effectively contain corruption because of their higher moral standards and public spirit; while others argue that women are not intrinsically more honest than men and that institutional and cultural contexts matter more. Gender differences may be suppressed in corrupt social atmospheres, and facing abundant opportunities and networks for corruption, women are as corrupt as men. The objective of this article is to explore the relationship between gender and corruption in China, a country that has been consistently considered as a fairly corrupt society.
For our piece we conducted a survey among 689 Chinese civil servants to measure their corruption tolerance towards thirteen typical types of corrupt practices in the Chinese government. The results indicate that women are consistently associated with lower tolerance across the thirteen corrupt practices, among which twelve items show statistically significant gender differences in corruption tolerance. The thought-provoking question is why women are less tolerant of corruption than men in a country beset by corruption, which is the opposite of the established literature arguing that women are as corrupt as men in corrupt societies. How is the influence of the Chinese context on women’s less inclination towards corruption?
We argue that women’s lower propensity to tolerate corruption than that of men derives from the exclusion effect of power or clientelist networks on women in the Chinese government. Clientelist or power networks in many countries still tend to exclude women from the inner sphere of formal rings of power or informal cliques where a considerable number of corrupt exchanges take place. The exclusion effect makes women less influenced by an atmosphere of corruption and less benefit from corruption, which combines to cause female officials’ lower corruption tolerance than that of men.
Patron-client relations occupy a prominent position in Chinese politics, and the emphasis on personal connections, allegiance to groups, and clientelist networks is rooted deep in Chinese history. Involvement in the core clientelist networks is critical for officials to obtain higher political status and more opportunities for corruption. However, Chinese female public officials are often excluded to the brink of power rings by formal rules and informal norms.
Our empirical results show that clientelism is a crucial explanatory variable in the relationship between gender and corruption tolerance. Specifically, women’s lower acceptance of clientelism value partly contributes them to have a stronger inclination to reject corruption than men. We also interviewed some public officials to explore the underlying causes of women’s lower tolerance for corruption. The interviews show that ritual wining and dining are primary informal ways for officials to build clientelist networks and engage in secret corrupt transactions. Female officials find it difficult to fit in the culture of drinking, causing them to be less involved in male networks.
Our study sheds a light on the established literature by providing an alternative explanation to the gender-corruption link, namely, gendered clientelism. It seems that corruption is more of a gendered term as it privileges men by favoring male dominance in the control of power networks and thus harms women.
Read the full article here: Gendered clientelism and corruption: are women less corrupt than men in China?
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Wenyan Tu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong. Her leading research interests cover corruption and anti-corruption reform, bureaucratic politics, and gender policies.
Xiajuan Guo is a professor of public administration in the Department of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests cover gender politics and policies and administrative ethics.