As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Francesca Jensenius, Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

She will present her work titled Time in Office and the Changing Gender Gap in Dishonesty: Evidence from Local Politics in India, coauthored with Ananish Chaudhuri, Vegard Iversen, and Pushkar Maitra.

Abstract: Increasing the share of women in politics is regularly promoted as a means of reducing corruption. In this paper, we consider the gender gap in dishonesty among elected representatives, and how this changes with time in office. We combine survey data on attitudes towards corruption with data from incentivized experiments. Our sample consists of 400 inexperienced and experienced local politicians in West Bengal, India. While we find little evidence of a gender gap in the attitudes of inexperienced politicians, experienced female politicians exhibit a stronger distaste for corruption. However, this seeming hardening in attitudes among female politicians also coincides with more dishonest behavior in our experiments. Exploring mechanisms that can explain this difference, we find it to be strongly associated with lower risk aversion and lower political aspirations. Our study indicates that gender gaps in politics should be theorized as dynamic and changing, rather than static.

About the speaker

Francesca Jensenius is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), specialising in comparative politics, comparative political economy, and research methods, with a regional focus on South Asia. Her main research interest is how electoral dynamics and institutional design affect different types of inequality in societies. Jensenius was the Nils Klim Prize laureate of 2018, and was awarded the Christian Michelsen Prize for outstanding development research in 2016.