This essay reviews two research programs. The first focuses on variations in the number of women elected to national parliaments in the world (descriptive representation), and the second focuses on effects of women's presence in parliament (substantive representation). The theory of the politics of presence (Phillips 1995) provides reasons for expecting a link between descriptive and substantive representation. The safest position would be to say that results are "mixed" when it comes to empirical support for the theory of the politics of presence. However, when a large number of studies covering a wide set of indicators on the importance of gender in the parliamentary process are piled together, the picture that emerges shows that female politicians contribute to strengthening the position of women's interests.

This article focuses on women's representation in the Swedish Riksdag. The theory of the politics of presence serves as a point of departure. The aim is to underpin empirically^or to test empirically^the assertion that female politicians, to a greater extent than male politicians, represent the interests of women. The concept of women's interests divides, on a theoretical level, into three components: the recognition of women as a social category; acknowledgement of the unequal balance of power between the sexes; and the occurrence of policies to increase the autonomy of female citizens. On the empirical level this corresponds to measurements indicating female versus male MPs' attitudes and behaviour in areas such as gender equality and social welfare policy. The data used are parliamentary survey studies from 1985, 1988, and 1994. The analysis controls for e¡ects of politicians' gender when other factors^e.g. party a¤liation, age, education, and parliamentary experience^are taken into account. The main result is that the theory of the politics of presence gains strong empirical support. What this study contributes is a signi¢cant measure of stability for the feminist critique of more established theories of representative democracy.

Disappointed by the numerous failures of anticorruption reforms, international organisations, scholars and policy makers increasingly place their hopes on measures aimed at enhancing gender equality and in particular increasing the inclusion of female representatives in elected assemblies. Yet most studies to date focus on aggregate measures of corruption and fail to explain why the correlation between women's representation and levels of corruption occurs. Using newly collected regional‐level, non‐perception‐based measures of corruption, this study distinguishes between different forms of corruption and shows that the inclusion of women in local councils is strongly negatively associated with the prevalence of both petty and grand forms of corruption. However, the reduction in corruption is primarily experienced among women. This suggests that female representatives seek to further two separate political agendas once they attain public office: the improvement of public service delivery in sectors that tend to primarily benefit women; and the breakup of male‐dominated collusive networks.

Scholars have argued that recruiting more women to office is an effective way to curb corruption; however, the more precise mechanisms underlying why this may be the case have remained unclear. We use meso-level theories to elaborate on the relationship and suggest that institutional logics mediate the effect of gendered experiences on corruption. We make two propositions: First, we suggest that the relationship between more women and lower levels of corruption is weaker in the state administration than in the legislative arena, because the bureaucratic administrative logic absorbs actors' personal characteristics. Second, we refine our institutional argument by claiming that the stronger the bureaucratic principles are in the administration, the less gender matters. We validate our theory using data provided by the European Commission (EC) covering the EC countries and original data from the Quality of Government Institute Expert Surveys, covering a larger set of countries on a worldwide scale. The ArgumentCorruption, or the act of using public power for private ends, can be considered a major destructive force for humans and human societies. Research has shown that corruption is one of the most detrimental factors currently afflicting the economies of developing countries. It further undercuts various dimensions of human well-being, such as health, access to clean water, and education as well as negatively affects subjective dimensions such as human subjective well-being and happiness (Halleröd et al. 2012;Rothstein and Holmberg 2012;Swaroop and Rajkumar 2002). Moreover, corruption may have deeper destabilizing consequences in society, as it arguably threatens not only the direct output of government, but also its prerequisite: people's willingness to pay taxes. Its negative consequences are further not isolated to developing countries, but also concern developed countries. In a recent study, Stefan Svallfors (2013) compare attitudes toward taxes and social spending across European countries and conclude that the organization of government affects people's judgments of how well government works (absence of corruption), which in turn affects their preparedness to pay taxes, leading to long-term consequences for possibilities to pursue encompassing welfare state policy. Hence, as an overview by Treisman (2007) shows, a vast body of research confirms how serious the problem of corruption is perceived to be.There are clear correlations between gender and corruption. On the one hand, women suffer disproportionately from the effects of corruption, as women are overrepresented among the world's poor. 1 On the other hand, women themselves, compared to men, tend to be less involved in corrupt transactions. There is a growing body of gender and corruption research exploring the relationships between higher