Justin Esarey

Fairer Sex or Purity Myth? Corruption, Gender, and Institutional Context

Recent research finds that states with more women involved in government are also less prone to corruption (Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti 2001; Swamy et al. 2001). But a review of experimental evidence indicates that “women are not necessarily more intrinsically honest or averse to corruption than men” in the laboratory or in the field (Frank, Lambsdorff, and Boehm 2011, 68). Rather, the attitudes and behaviors of women concerning corruption depend on institutional and cultural contexts in these experimental situations (Alatas, Cameron, and Chaudhuri 2009; Alhassan-Alolo 2007; Armantier and Boly 2008; Schulze and Frank 2003). If womens inclination toward corruption is contextual, then what are the contexts in which we would expect female involvement in government to fight corruption? The answer is important to understand where gender equality initiatives present a cost-effective and politically feasible approach to cleaning up government.

Social Insurance and Income Redistribution in a Laboratory Experiment

Why do some voters support income redistribution while others do not? Public assistance programs have two entangled effects on society: they equalize wealth, but they also cushion people against random catastrophes (like natural disasters). The authors conduct a laboratory experiment to determine how individuals’ responses to the environment are related to their self-expressed political ideology and their self-interest. The findings support the hypothesis that ideology is associated with a person’s willingness to use redistribution to reduce income inequality that is caused by luck, but it is not related to preferences for inequality that are not related to luck.

Marginal Effects in Interaction Models: Determining and Controlling the False Positive Rate

When a researcher suspects that the marginal effect of x on y varies with z , a common approach is to plot ∂ y / ∂ x at different values of z along with a pointwise confidence interval generated using the procedure described in Brambor, Clark, and Golder to assess the magnitude and statistical significance of the relationship. Our article makes three contributions. First, we demonstrate that the Brambor, Clark, and Golder approach produces statistically significant findings when ∂ y / ∂ x = 0 at a rate that can be many times larger or smaller than the nominal false positive rate of the test. Second, we introduce the interactionTest software package for R to implement procedures that allow easy control of the false positive rate. Finally, we illustrate our findings by replicating an empirical analysis of the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the number of political parties from Comparative Political Studies.

Political Context and the Consequences of Naming and Shaming for Human Rights Abuse

ABSTRACT Does being named and shamed for human rights abuse influence the amount of foreign aid received by the shamed state? Recent research suggests that the impact of public censure may depend on the political relationship between donor and recipient. We argue that donors deriving a direct political benefit from the aid relationship (such as a military advantage or the satisfaction of a domestic political audience) will ignore or work against condemnation, but donors with little political interest in the recipient (who give aid for symbolic or humanitarian reasons) will punish condemned states. We also argue that the size of prior aid packages can be used as a holistic measure of the donor’s political interest in the aid relationship because mutually beneficial aid packages are subject to a bargaining process that favors recipients with more to offer. We find that condemnation for human rights abuse by the United Nations is associated with lower bilateral aid levels among states that previously received small aid package, and with equal or higher bilateral aid to states already receiving a great deal of aid. The source of shaming also matters: We find that public shaming by human rights NGOs is not associated with decreased aggregate bilateral aid.

Measuring the effects of publication bias in political science

Prior research finds that statistically significant results are overrepresented in scientific publications. If significant results are consistently favored in the review process, published results could systematically overstate the magnitude of their findings even under ideal conditions. In this paper, we measure the impact of this publication bias on political science using a new data set of published quantitative results. Although any measurement of publication bias depends on the prior distribution of empirical relationships, we determine that published estimates in political science are on average substantially larger than their true value under a variety of reasonable choices for this prior. We also find that many published estimates have a false positive probability substantially greater than the conventional α = 0.05 threshold for statistical significance if the prior probability of a null relationship exceeds 50%. Finally, although the proportion of published false positives would be reduced if significance tests used a smaller α, this change would not solve the problem of upward bias in the magnitude of published results.

Gender and Citizen Responses to Corruption among Politicians: The U.S. and Brazil

Schwindt-Bayer, Esarey, and Schumacher evaluate whether voters perceive of comparable male and female candidates differently in terms of how likely they are to be involved in a corruption scandal and punish them differently when they are involved in corruption. We conducted survey experiments in two countries, the United States (with high electoral accountability) and Brazil (with moderate to low electoral accountability), to determine if differential treatment is the causal mechanism linking women’s representation and corruption. We find only weak and statistically uncertain evidence that citizens perceive women as less corruptible than men in both countries, and we find no evidence that they punish women more harshly than men for corruption scandals.