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Abstract

Does the corruption of a woman politician decrease public support for other women political leaders? To answer this question, this article examines how the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the first female president of South Korea, affects people’s perceptions of women’s political leadership in South Korea. We argue that in South Korea, the high-level political corruption scandal of the first woman president led to lower evaluations of women’s political leadership because of the intense and gendered media coverage of Park’s failure. Using the two waves of the World Values Survey conducted in South Korea before and after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in 2017, we show that Park’s impeachment negatively affects people’s views of female political leaders. This negative effect is conditioned by party identification. Our work suggests that the effects of gendered evaluations of leaders’ corruption can extend beyond the evaluation of the leaders themselves, thus affecting women’s representation more generally.

Keywords

Corruption female political leaders public opinion Park Geun-Hye South Korea

Introduction

In 2018, Judge Kim Se-yoon in South Korea sentenced former president Park Geun-hye to 24 years in prison and a nearly $17m fine for the corruption scandal that ended her presidency. The judge stated that Park caused ‘massive chaos’ because of the scandal, demonstrations, and impeachment that followed, and that ‘We [Korea] cannot help but sternly hold her accountable’ (BBC 6 April 2018). Previous research suggests that the presence of women politicians in government correlates with lower levels of corruption (Eggers et al., 2018; Esarey and Schwindt-Bayer, 2018; Sung, 2003). The mechanisms underlying the women–corruption nexus are far from settled in the literature, but research posits two claims central to this paper as part of these mechanisms connecting more women to lower corruption. First, voters hold gender stereotypes that associate women politicians with honesty and ethical behavior (Barnes and Beaulieu, 2019; Huddy and Capelos, 2002). Second, because of these stereotypes, voters both expect women to ‘clean up’ after corruption and will punish women who engage in corruption more harshly than they would punish men. But what about when a high-profile woman engages in the corruption?

Previous work identifies some instances in which women engaged in high-profile corruption are punished more than their male counterparts. For example, Michele Bachelet, President of Chile, saw her approval ratings drop more dramatically after a scandal than previous male presidents who engaged in scandal (Reyes-Housholder, 2020). Similarly, President Joyce Banda of Malawi lost her re-election bid due to harsher punishment after scandal compared to her male predecessor (Dulani et al., 2021). Media coverage of role incongruency for these women presidents between their female expectations and the masculine executive office can exacerbate these disproportionate voter punishments (Davidson-Schmich et al., 2023; Trimble, 2018). We argue, however, that the effects of these voter punishments extend beyond the high-focus woman politician at the center of the scandal. Extensive media coverage of a scandal influences the process by which voters update their stereotypes about women politicians, and they are more likely to consider women presidents as exemplars against which to judge other women politicians, particularly when women leaders are a rarity. The public attribute the failure of the woman president to her gender, and these gendered perceptions subsequently apply to women politicians in general. Hence, we believe that public opinion about the suitability of women in office more generally suffers after a prominent woman politician demonstrates corruption.

To test our argument, we use the case of Park Geun-hye in South Korea to examine the effect of her impeachment on opinions about women candidates more generally. With expectations that she could improve South Korean democracy and contribute to greater gender equality, Park won the election with the largest number of votes since the country’s first direct presidential election after its democratization in 1987. However, she was unable to complete her term due to a corruption scandal known as ‘Choi Soon-sil Gate’, and was impeached on March 10, 2017, after more than six months of nationwide protests calling for Park’s resignation. Using data from the sixth and seventh waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) conducted in South Korea in 2010 and 2018, we find that Park’s impeachment as a highly visible female leader leads to negative views of women in office among the electorate after her impeachment. More interestingly, we find that the influence of Park’s impeachment is conditioned by respondents’ partisanship but not by respondents’ gender.

Our research contributes to the existing literature on gender and politics by demonstrating that the negative effects of a backlash against a woman politician who engages in corruption extend beyond that leader to women’s leadership more generally. Our findings have important implications for women’s advancement in politics and women’s representation.

Previous literature on gender and corruption

A substantial body of work identifies a correlation between women politicians and lower levels of corruption in government. For instance, Watson and Moreland (2014) find that perceptions of corruption in a country are lower when there are both greater numbers of women in office and more attention paid to women’s issues in government. Similarly, Dollar et al. (2001) and Stensöta and Wängnerud (2018) find a robust relationship between higher female representation in legislatures or governments and lower levels of corruption across countries or subunits of government. Although the correlation between women’s presence and lower corruption exists across studies, the reasons for this relationship are varied and still yet uncertain.

One reason that women’s presence is related to lower levels of corruption is that the existence of corruption in the first place creates adverse conditions for women’s presence in government. Corruption creates a culture and context that benefits male politicians who are already privileged in the existing system and perpetuates male dominance in politics (Sundström and Wängnerud, 2016). Women politicians may lack access to formal and informal networks or the financial means needed to engage in corruption (Barnes and Beaulieu, 2019). Alternatively, if women politicians are recruited from the same corrupt network as men, we should expect that their presence in government will not reduce corruption, as their presence in government relies on the initial source of corruption (Bjarnegård, 2018). Thus, Bjarnegård (2018) argues that the relationship between gender and corruption should be viewed through the lens of the connection between masculinity and corruption, because men in politics have the physical and social assets to be ingrained in the networks that fuel corruption.

A second reason for the connection between women and lower corruption is whether formal and informal institutions exist to deter corruption and how women and men politicians react to these institutions. Democratic political institutions, such as separation of powers, competitive elections, free media, and moral imperatives, are likely to deter politicians from engaging in corruption (Esarey and Chirillo, 2013; Sung, 2003). In democratic contexts, female politicians may find that the potential punishment for violating norms against corruption is too high, especially since gender discrimination may result in harsher punishments for female politicians (Esarey and Chirillo, 2013). High electoral accountability, especially when electoral systems are more personalistic than party-centered so that voters hold individual politicians accountable rather than parties, also acts as a deterrent to women’s propensity to engage in corrupt behavior (Esarey and Schwindt-Bayer, 2018). Given that women are more risk-averse than men, such institutional sanctions may have a greater impact on female politicians than male politicians, resulting in a noticeable gender gap in corruption in democracies (Esarey and Chirillo, 2013; Esarey and Schwindt-Bayer, 2018).

The third reason for the relationship between gender and corruption reverses the first; women end up in office to reduce corruption because of gendered expectations. Because voters generally perceive women as more honest and ethical than men, and therefore less likely to engage in fraud and corruption (Barnes and Beaulieu, 2019), the occurrence of a corruption scandal may increase voter support for women candidates more than would otherwise be the case. Certainly, evidence exists that voters hold gendered stereotypes about male and female politicians’ honesty, with women seen as more honest and moral (e.g., Huddy and Capelos, 2002). Whether voter stereotypes affect election outcomes is a hotly debated subject more generally (e.g., see Dolan, 2014). In the case of government corruption, the link between stereotypical assumptions of women candidates is often hypothesized but quite complicated across empirical studies.

Some evidence exists that voters and parties prefer to vote for women candidates after a corruption scandal involving men. Valdini (2019) argues that political parties will strategically promote women candidates after a corruption scandal to improve their images. Bauhr et al. (2019) also note that women in local office will reduce fiscal corruption by improving the delivery of public sector benefits to women. Recent work in Latin America, however, contests the relationship between voting for women and the existence of corruption. Support for women candidates after corruption scandals is dependent on the country and whether a candidate comes from a party that previously engaged in corruption (Le Foulon and Reyes-Housholder, 2021).

What happens, however, when a woman engages in corruption? From the voters’ perspective, the existing research provides mixed results on whether voters react differently to corruption depending on the gender of the corruptors. Dulani et al. (2021) argue that women politicians tend to be punished more severely than their male counterparts after corruption because voters judge women against a higher standard derived from gendered expectations. Focusing on Joyce Banda, a female president of Malawi, Dulani et al. attribute Banda’s failure to win re-election after she and her administration were tainted by a corruption scandal to the fact that Malawian voters punished Banda more harshly than they did male officeholders who faced corruption scandals before and after her. Barnes et al. (2020) find compelling evidence that voters react more strongly to political scandals against female politicians through both hostile and benevolent sexism. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, Batista Pereira (2021) finds that female politicians face a stronger backlash to corruption allegations in certain contexts, but not universally. His experimental surveys in Mexico and Brazil show that female politicians lose more popular support than male politicians after corruption in Mexico, but this gender gap is not found in Brazil. He concludes that voters’ gendered treatment of politicians depends on individual and contextual factors.

Other studies, however, fail to find differential citizen responses to corrupt politicians based on their gender. Schwindt-Bayer et al. (2018), for example, find that voters in Brazil and the US neither perceive corruptibility of male and female politicians differently nor punish them differently for corruption. This null finding is surprising, especially given that the literature suggests that a political context with high accountability for corruption such as the US contributes to voters’ gendered expectations as well as a gender gap in political corruption (Esarey and Chirillo, 2013; Esarey and Schwindt-Bayer, 2018). Similarly, Eggers et al. (2018) show that voters in the UK do not punish corrupt female and male politicians differently in general, although women respondents in the experiment tend to treat corrupt women politicians slightly more harshly. Le Foulon and Reyes-Housholder (2021) and Schwindt-Bayer et al. (2018) find that when voters are told that corruption is widespread, they show indifference to the gender of the candidates involved in corruption. More interestingly, in Uruguay, voters punish corrupt female candidates less than male candidates when they perceive that corruption is not widespread.

In sum, within the broad correlation between gender and corruption, many questions remain, such as the causal relationship between the two, variation across countries, and which voters hold which politicians accountable for corruption, and why. We argue that one further question about how voters evaluate a corrupt woman politician remains: does a significant corruption scandal involving a woman affect how the public sees other women candidates after the scandal? As we describe below, the recent impeachment of Park Geun-hye in South Korea offers an interesting case to explore this relationship.

Park Geun-hye and corruption

The dramatic rise and fall of Park Geun-hye as South Korea’s first female president provide an interesting context for examining the impact of a female politician’s corruption scandal on public opinion about women candidates for several reasons. First, the presence of a woman president, the most powerful and visible office in presidential systems, should have a more significant impact on public opinion than women in other offices. Second, the fact that Park is the first woman elected to the presidency in South Korea should have additional symbolic significance concerning gender stereotypes or gendered perceptions and punishment of politicians’ misdeeds (Schwindt-Bayer and Reyes-Housholder, 2017). Third, Park’s removal from the presidency through impeachment after a series of national protests was such a dramatic event that everyone recognized her failed presidency, making it a salient case to test its impact on public opinion.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1998, Park Geun-hye ascended to the top of her party, the conservative Liberty Korea Party, and became one of South Korea’s best-known politicians. As her nickname ‘Election Queen’ suggests, she played a central role in solidifying conservative voters and rallying support for the party. Also, as the daughter of former President Park Chung-hee (1963–1979), a long-time military dictator, Park Geun-hye evoked nostalgia among older generations with conservative ideological preferences for the miraculous economic development South Korea achieved during Park Chung-hee’s regime (Kang, 2016). Even before her election to the presidency in 2012, Park Geun-hye was considered one of the strongest potential presidential candidates. In the 2012 election, she defeated her Democratic Party opponent, Moon Jae-in, with 51.6% of the vote.

Park was the first presidential candidate in South Korea to win office by winning the majority of votes. She enjoyed solid support from women voters, who cast 3.2% more votes for her than for Moon Jae-in (Kim D, 2014). During her campaign, Park Geun-hye emphasized that she was the first female presidential candidate and capitalized on her gender attributes. She described her leadership as a motherly leadership that could unite the divided public and usher in a new era of happiness and prosperity (Torkunov et al., 2022). The mainstream media, especially conservative news outlets including Chosun Ilbo, Donga Ilbo, and Joongang Ilbo, emphasized that as the daughter of an economic leader, Park Geun-hye could lead the second ‘Miracle of the Han River’¹ as her father did in the 1960s.

With the support of conservative voters, especially those over the age of 40, Park Geun-hye maintained a stable approval rating during her term despite several incidents. For instance, in 2014, the Sewol ferry sank on its route from Incheon to Jeju Island in South Korea, killing more than 300 passengers. The Sewol ferry disaster generated widespread public reaction to Park’s leadership and her administration’s ability as a crisis manager. Despite such incidents, Park still enjoyed a reasonable approval rating of over 40%, which is considered high in South Korea (Kim M-s, 2023). For example, her immediate predecessors, such as former presidents Lee Myung-bak and Roh Mu-hyun, saw their approval ratings plummet to a percentage in the low 20s during their lame-duck periods.

Park Geun-hye’s good fortune began to crumble with her involvement in a corruption scandal called ‘Choi Soon-sil Gate’. Choi Soon-sil Gate was first reported in September 2016 by Hankyoreh, a liberal newspaper in South Korea. The newspaper reported that Choi Soon-sil, President Park’s personal aide and close friend, had inappropriate access to and wielded too much influence over President Park. Choi allegedly received regular reports on Park’s schedule, speeches, and personnel arrangements. Choi was indicted on charges of extorting bribes, abuse of power, and leaking classified documents. President Park was also accused of having illegal business ties with Choi Soon-sil through the ‘Mi-r Foundation’ and the ‘K-Sports Foundation’, which were established by Park in early 2016. After extensive reporting by various media outlets, especially JTBC, public opinion against Park shifted dramatically. Public outrage led to 20 non-violent protests and candlelight vigils calling for her resignation from October 2016 to March 2017. Despite her father’s image of successful leadership, she inherited, the extraordinary attention and expectations placed on her as South Korea’s first female president, and the concrete support she received from conservative voters, Park Geun-hye was impeached by a unanimous decision of the eight members of the Korean Constitutional Court in March 2017.

Park’s impeachment provides an important opportunity to examine how the corruption scandal of a high-level female politician affects public perceptions of women politicians. South Korea is one of the most successful third-wave democracies with high electoral accountability, free and fair elections, and free and active citizen political participation (Cho et al., 2019). In addition, Freedom House (2021) ranks South Korea’s news media as fairly open and independent. For these reasons, South Korea is considered to have mechanisms in place to prevent corruption scandals from going unnoticed, and, once they are exposed, voters can and do punish the politicians involved (Esarey and Schwindt-Bayer, 2018).

South Korean politics is also highly personalistic. Its electoral competition and party system are largely defined by charismatic political leaders, capitalizing on strong personalistic cues rather than programmatic or clientelistic ones (Kim M-s, 2015). This feature is cited as one of the main reasons for the low degree of institutionalization of the South Korean party system (Hellmann, 2011). The personalistic party and electoral system leads voters to hold individual politicians accountable. Therefore, when a corruption scandal occurs, voters focus on the politician involved, which in the case of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment means that South Korean voters tend to focus on her and her personal attributes to blame for her failure. One of her most salient personal attributes is that she is a female political leader, and thus this case provides a context in which one can test whether and how her failure as a high-profile female politician affects public perceptions of other female politicians in general. Previous work documents the effects on approval of a president perceived as corrupt (e.g., Bachelet in Chile), but only on opinion about the president herself or trust in the government more generally (Reyes-Housholder, 2020).

Finally, corruption is a persistent problem in South Korea, especially among presidents and other high-profile politicians. In fact, all former presidents since the country’s democratic transition in 1987, with the exception of Moon Jae-in, the immediate predecessor of the current administration, have been convicted of corruption and served prison terms. Corruption is one of the challenges of maturing democracy in South Korea, along with its neighbors Japan and Taiwan, as these East Asian democracies score high on the institutional criteria of democracy, but still struggle with political corruption and a lack of public trust in government as a result (Chang and Chu, 2006; Pharr, 2000). Several efforts have been made to explain the coexistence of corruption and democratic development as well as economic growth among East Asian democracies, ranging from cultural (i.e., Confucianism) to institutional approaches (i.e., the extensive development of informal politics) (Cheng and Womack, 1996). The rampant high-level corruption scandals in South Korea do not make Park Geun-hye’s corruption scandal particularly extraordinary or unprecedented, providing a setting in which to test whether there is a gendered effect of corruption on public opinion about women candidates.

Theory and hypotheses

Does the impeachment of South Korea’s first female president affect public opinion about other women political leaders? We argue that Park’s impeachment negatively affects public opinion about women in office more generally because of gender stereotypes (Garcia-Retamero and López-Zafra, 2006). Gender stereotypes are not static but dynamic. As voters experience women political leaders, they update their thoughts and attitudes about them accordingly. Previous literature on gender stereotypes and women representatives finds that new exemplars of women political leaders alter the pre-existing stereotypes (Sanbonmatsu, 2002). The exemplar model argues that voters tend to view the exemplar as representing a group to which the individual belongs when there are not enough examples of members of the group. Therefore, the public uses the exemplar as a benchmark to evaluate members of the group as a whole.

Because of their rarity, the political successes and failures of women presidents receive a great deal of public and media attention. For example, Trimble et al. (2021) find that of 20 women premiers in Canada and Australia, those who were ‘first’ received more gendered media coverage of their personal and family lives than did the ‘second’ women after them. Trimble (2018) argues this focus on gendered coverage exacerbates women’s role incongruity between politician and mother or wife through the use of gendered language. Under these circumstances, the public is more likely to consider female presidents as exemplars against which to judge other female politicians. Therefore, we argue that Park Geun-hye’s impeachment negatively affects public opinion about female politicians by reinforcing existing gender stereotypes against female candidates, or by increasing skepticism about female political leaders:

Hypothesis 1: The impeachment of Park Geun-hye negatively affects public opinion toward female politicians in general.

Second, we argue that the effect of Park’s impeachment may vary depending on the gender of the individual. The existing literature is mixed on whether one sex punishes or forgives corruption in women politicians more readily. Some recent studies on gender and corruption find that female citizens tend to punish the misconduct of female politicians more severely than their male counterparts do (Alexander et al., 2020; Eggers et al., 2018). Others find few significant differences between how women and men would vote for a corrupt candidate (Schwindt-Bayer et al., 2018). Similarly, the effect of gender stereotypes on male or female voters may depend on the cultural context in the country (Benstead and Lust, 2018). Given the two conflicting expectations, we leave open the effect of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on women’s perceptions of female politicians compared to men:

Hypothesis 2-1: The negative impact of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on public opinion toward female politicians is stronger for women than for men.

Hypothesis 2-2: The negative impact of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on public opinion of female politicians is not significantly different between women and men.

Finally, we also consider whether the partisanship of the respondent affects the impact of Park’s impeachment on opinion. Party identification influences people’s perceptions of politicians. For example, Dolan (2014) shows that people tend to support candidates of their political party regardless of the candidate’s gender. In addition, Larcinese and Sircar (2017) show that citizens display partisan bias: they are likely to believe that the representatives of their own party are less involved in scandals and their punishment for corruption is directed more at the corrupt politicians than at their party. Thus, we expect that voters who support Park’s Liberty Korea Party are less likely to punish her and other women politicians for a corruption scandal:

Hypothesis 3: The negative impact of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on public opinion toward female politicians is weaker among Liberty Korea Party supporters than among supporters of other parties and non-partisans.

Empirical analysis

To test the hypotheses, this article employs the sixth and seventh waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) conducted in South Korea. The sixth wave of the WVS was conducted in South Korea in 2010, when the former president Park Geun-hye emerged as a strong presidential candidate. The seventh wave of the WVS, on the other hand, was conducted in 2018, shortly after Park’s impeachment. These two waves of the survey provide a valuable opportunity to conduct a quasi-experimental empirical analysis to uncover the influence of the failure of the female president on public opinion about female politicians. The use of a quasi-experimental design allows us to make causal claims and inferences about the impact of Park’s impeachment, increasing internal validity compared to general statistical approaches (Hansen, 2012). At the same time, our quasi-experimental research design enhances external validity because we take advantage of an actual corruption event and compare public opinion before and after the event, rather than conducting an experiment with a hypothetical situation.

The key independent variable is Park’s Impeachment. We assign a 0 if respondents did not experience Park’s impeachment (sixth wave) and 1 if they did (seventh wave). Our dependent variable is Female Political Leadership using the question ‘Do you agree with the following statement: men make better political leaders than women do’. Respondents chose among four options: ‘Strongly agree (1)’, ‘Agree (2)’, ‘Disagree (3)’, or ‘Strongly disagree (4)’. Those who agree with the statement have skeptical views of female political leadership, whereas those who disagree hold positive views. To examine the heterogeneous impact of Park’s impeachment on Female Political Leadership by respondents’ gender and partisanship, we use variables Female and Partisanship. Both variables are binary, in which Female measures whether a respondent is a female or not and Partisanship indicates the Liberty Korea Party, the party to which Park belongs.

We include a conventional set of individual-level control variables. First, respondents’ demographic variables are included, such as Age, Marital Status, Income, Employment, and Education. Age is a continuous variable ranging from 18 to 88, whereas Marital Status is a binary variable, indicating whether a respondent is married or not. Income is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 indicating the lowest income group and 10 indicating the highest income group. Employment is a binary variable indicating whether the respondent is a full-time employee or not, and Education measures the respondent’s level of education on a scale of 1–4, where 1 is primary education and 4 is tertiary education. Also, we control for the respondent’s interest in politics. Interest in Politics ranges from 1, not at all interested, to 4, very interested. We also include Political Ideology, which measures the respondent’s self-placement on a 1–10 scale on the left–right ideological spectrum, where 1 indicates extreme left and 10 indicates extreme right. We include ideology because previous studies have found that liberal voters are more likely to support female representatives than conservative voters (Bakker et al., 2015). Lastly, given that women’s rights and political empowerment are closely related to the level of democracy (Clayton et al., 2019), we include Importance of Democracy as one of the control variables. It measures how important respondents consider democracy to be on a 10-point scale, with 1 indicating not important and 10 very important. Table A.1 in the Appendix presents descriptive statistics for all variables included in our empirical analysis.

Given that our dependent variable is an ordinal variable, we employ ordered logistic regression. As a robustness check, we also estimate the model using logistic regression by collapsing the dependent variable into two categories: assigning 0 if respondents strongly agree or agree with the statement that men make better political leaders than women, and 1 otherwise. The results are displayed in Table 1.

Table 1.

Effects of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on public opinion of female political leadership.

	Ordered logistic		Logistic
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
Park’s Impeachment	−0.292** (0.099)	−1.037*** (0.230)	−0.242* (0.108)	−1.062*** (0.259)
Liberty Korea Party	−0.014(0.120)	−0.294(0.158)	0.025(0.130)	−0.285(0.166)
Park’s Impeachment XLiberty Korea Party		0.875*** (0.230)		1.012*** (0.266)
Female	0.473*** (0.099)	0.436** (0.165)	0.574*** (0.104)	0.582*** (0.162)
Park’s Impeachment XFemale		0.063(0.189)		−0.011(0.201)
Age	−0.025*** (0.004)	−0.025*** (0.004)	−0.027*** (0.005)	−0.026*** (0.005)
Marital Status	−0.036(0.025)	−0.034(0.025)	−0.049(0.028)	−0.049(0.029)
Interest in Politics	0.145* (0.073)	0.132(0.074)	0.175* (0.073)	0.162* (0.074)
Political Ideology	−0.097*** (0.029)	−0.092** (0.029)	−0.088** (0.027)	−0.082** (0.027)
Importance of Democracy	0.080** (0.030)	0.080** (0.029)	0.077* (0.034)	0.077* (0.034)
Income	0.026(0.030)	0.026(0.030)	0.026(0.033)	0.027(0.033)
Employment (full-time)	0.002(0.094)	0.010(0.095)	−0.037(0.104)	−0.035(0.104)
Education	0.068(0.052)	0.067(0.053)	0.068(0.057)	0.065(0.058)
Constant			−0.297(0.570)	0.460(0.567)
Cut 1	−2.071*** (0.552)	−2.746*** (0.553)
Cut 2	0.121(0.549)	−0.543(0.548)
Cut 3	2.548*** (0.550)	1.897*** (0.546)
Number of observations	2408	2408	2408	2408
AIC	5543.502	5529.681	3141.515	3126.987
BIC	5624.513	5622.265	3210.953	3207.999

Note: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. Robust standard errors in parentheses. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) are presented for model comparisons.

Across all models, Park’s impeachment negatively affects public opinion about female political leaders in South Korea, as expected. In other words, respondents who experience Park’s impeachment are more likely to agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘Men make better political leaders than women do’. In terms of odds ratios, Park’s impeachment decreases the odds of holding a favorable view of women as political leaders by 0.292 in the ordered logistic regression model (Model 1), holding all other variables in the model constant. A similar result is found in Model 3. This result provides empirical evidence for Hypothesis 1 that a female president’s corruption scandal negatively affects people’s views of female politicians in general.

We also conducted the nearest-neighbor matching based on Mahalanobis distance to examine the average treatment effect (ATE) and the average treatment effect on the treated (ATET) of Park’s impeachment on the evaluation of female political leaders. The results are presented in the Appendix (Table A.2). According to the results, the estimated ATEs and ATETs of Park’s impeachment are statistically significant with different numbers of matches ranging from 1 to 10. Table A.2 affirms the results presented in Table 1 above, indicating a significant negative effect of Park’s impeachment on public evaluations of female political leaders, in support of Hypothesis 1.

There are also interesting findings from the control variables in Table 1. First, unlike other established democracies such as the US where one can find a clear gap between Democratic and Republican party supporters in their support for women politicians (Elder, 2014), Liberty Korea Party identification has no effect on how people view women as political leaders. In all models, the coefficients of Liberty Korea Party are not statistically significant. We believe this has to do with South Korea’s weak party system and weak party loyalty, resulting in a lack of significant impact of party identification on people’s attitudes (Lee and Singer, 2022).

Second, female respondents tend to have more positive opinions of female politicians than their male counterparts. The coefficients of Female are all positive and statistically significant in all models, indicating that female respondents are more likely to disagree that men are better political leaders than women. Third, consistent with the extant literature, age is associated with negative views of female politicians: the older one is, the more conservative one is in regard to gender roles, and the more negative one views women’s suitability as political leaders.

Political ideology also affects individuals’ attitudes toward women politicians, showing that ideological conservatism consistently reduces the likelihood of supporting women as political leaders. Interest in Politics shows that individuals’ level of political interest is positively associated with their opinion of women political leaders in general, although its coefficient falls short of statistical significance in Model 2. In addition, those who value democracy are more likely to approve of women as political leaders consistent with previous research on the relationship between democratic values and gender equality. Other control variables such as income, education, marital status, and employment do not have any statistically significant effects on individuals’ opinions of women as political leaders.

To test Hypotheses 2 and 3 more accurately, we measure the conditional effects of female and the Liberty Korea Party identification on how Park’s impeachment affects individuals’ opinions of female political leaders. To do so, we re-estimate the models with the interaction terms and the results are presented in Model 2 and Model 4. It is shown that the interaction terms between Park’s Impeachment and Liberty Korea Party are statistically significant in positive directions in both ordered logistic and logistic regression models. This result indicates that the negative impact that Park’s impeachment has on people’s views of female political leadership is muted among the supporters of the Liberty Korea Party, to which the former President Park Geun-hye previously belonged. Put differently, Liberty Korea Party supporters are less sensitive to Park’s impeachment in their evaluation of other female politicians than those who support other parties or independents. This supports Hypothesis 3 that Park’s co-partisans are more likely to attribute her corruption to her individual factors rather than gender factors.

Figure 1 displays the substantive effects of the conditional effect between partisanship and Park’s impeachment on respondents’ evaluations of other female politicians. The predicted probability of respondents’ strongly disagreeing with the gender-biased statement about women’s suitability as political leaders significantly dropped among supporters of parties other than the Liberty Korea Party and independents, whereas there is no discernible difference between Liberty Korea Party supporters before and after Park’s impeachment. Specifically, in Model 2, the predicted probability of non-Liberty Korea Party supporters selecting ‘strongly disagree’ to the gender-biased statement about political leadership decreased from 11.52% before Park’s impeachment to 4.55% after Park’s impeachment. According to Model 4, the predicted probability of non-Liberty Korea Party supporters selecting ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘disagree’ decreased from 59.02% before Park’s impeachment to 33.10% after Park’s impeachment. In other words, although Liberty Korea Party supporters seem impervious to Park’s impeachment in their views of female political leaders, other party supporters and independents became significantly more skeptical of female political leaders in general after the impeachment. In short, this nuanced model provides support for Hypothesis 3.

Figure 1.

Park Geun-hye’s impeachment and predicted probability of negative opinions of female political leadership: conditional effects of the Liberty Korea Party Identification.

However, the interaction term between Park’s Impeachment and Female is not statistically significant. Although the coefficients of Female in all models suggest that women in general tend to view female political leadership more favorably than men, consistent with the descriptive representation literature that female voters are more supportive of female politicians than male voters (Campbell and Cowley, 2014; Sanbonmatsu, 2002), the interaction term suggests that there is no discernible difference between women and men in their assessment of women’s suitability for political leadership following the impeachment of Park Geun-hye. In other words, the negative impact of Park’s impeachment on public opinion of female political leadership is neither weaker among women than men, as the descriptive representation literature suggests, nor stronger, as the ‘women as the fairer sex’ thesis in the gender politics literature suggests.

Conclusion

This article examines how a prominent corruption scandal involving a woman political leader affects voters’ views of women politicians in general. Using the case of the 2017 impeachment of Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, we show that Park’s corruption scandal and subsequent impeachment led Korean voters to have a more skeptical view of female political leaders. The negative impact of the impeachment is stronger among supporters of Park’s opposition parties and independents than among supporters of her Liberty Korea Party, and the negative impact exists for both male and female voters. Our research goes beyond the existing literature to demonstrate that the harsher backlash women leaders face after a corruption scandal compared to their male counterparts extends to women’s leadership in general. Voters are more likely to question the suitability of women as political leaders and to focus on gender in response to corruption scandals and failures of female politicians, whereas this is not necessarily the case when male politicians are involved.

Our research raises a new host of questions within the literature on gender and corruption. Although the direction of and mechanisms driving the causal link between women in office and levels of corruption remains unclear, several previous studies identify ways in which women leaders who engage in corruption suffer stronger electoral consequences and voter anger (e.g., Barnes et al., 2020). Not all instances of female leader corruption lead to backlash, however; levels of corruption otherwise in the country and experimental versus electoral evidence tend to differ (e.g., Schwindt-Bayer et al., 2018). Here, we identify a further way in which corruption harms women in office: the consequences of corruption go beyond the singular woman in office who engaged in the corruption. Therefore, future research should look beyond evaluations of and votes for the leader after corruption and look for effects on other women in office in the country.

Further, our study suggests three mechanisms driving the effect of a corruption scandal that beg further examination. First, the role of the media in driving the extent of the backlash to the corruption scandal needs further assessment. In this case, Park’s impeachment involved international coverage of millions of protesters; arguably, this is as high-profile as an impeachment scandal can be in the media. Park’s position as the first female president of South Korea also likely drove media frames based around her failure as the ‘first’, sparking gendered evaluations of her corruption within an otherwise male institution (Trimble, 2018; Trimble et al., 2021). Perhaps second-order effects on other women in office only occur in media-visible corruption scandals of ‘first’ women. Second, the South Korean case suggests elements in which this corruption scandal might be evaluated against other cases. South Korea has both a long history of corruption and relatively few women in office compared to other commonly studied locations of gender politics and corruption.² Although the long history of corruption in the country might suggest less effect of a single corruption scandal on evaluations, the low number of women in office in South Korea may lead to stronger male associations with political office. Third, Park herself is an interesting case of corruption due to her insider relationship with the existing political structure; she is the daughter of a former dictator and perhaps engaged in corruption because she was part of the existing political system. How might a woman without these connections be evaluated by potential voters in a corruption scandal, or would she even have been given the opportunity to engage in corruption (Bjarnegård, 2018)?

We also acknowledge the limits of our study. For instance, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between voters’ perceptions of women politicians and electoral outcomes. Although we believe that public opinion of women politicians and their electoral support are closely related, the link between the two is not clear; many factors can intervene in the way that negative public opinion of women politicians leads to less electoral support for them. For example, negative public opinion may or may not be manifested in electoral outcomes, depending on the long-term versus short-term effects. In addition, political parties or candidates can adopt campaign strategies that can mitigate the negative impact of public opinion on women’s political leadership. For example, in South Korea, political parties strategically place women candidates on a proportional representation party list, instead of a single-member district tier. In this way, women candidates can be insulated from negative public opinion toward them and still win seats based on party votes (Shin, 2014).

Another limit of our work, of course, is that the current study is limited to the South Korean case. One cannot completely exclude the factors specific to South Korea that could potentially influence the relationship between a female president’s corruption and public opinion of women in office in general. Further work on other prominent cases of corruption, such as Dilma Rousseff in Brazil or Joyce Banda in Malawi, might elucidate whether the corruption scandals of these leaders had effects on other women in politics in the country. Our case, however, generates significant hypotheses for testing in other cultural and political contexts.

Further, if, as we demonstrate here, a prominent corruption scandal involving a woman president affects the state of women and politics elsewhere in the country, our work suggests a worrying potential backslide in women’s advancement in politics. More work is needed to understand the longer-term effects of gendered corruption scandals on women’s representation. Modern feminist representation recognizes that the process by which women are represented is as important as the outcome, in that diversity and equality of women’s interests must be present (Celis and Childs, 2020). If corruption is a feature of many modern democratic governments, women politicians’ differential treatment in response to corruption potentially undermines the process of women’s representation.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ips-10.1177_01925121241302776 – Supplemental material for Gendered punishment? How the corruption of female politicians affects public opinion of female political leadership

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ips-10.1177_01925121241302776 for Gendered punishment? How the corruption of female politicians affects public opinion of female political leadership by Byung-Deuk Woo, Mi-son Kim and Tracy Osborn in International Political Science Review

Supplemental Material

sj-xlsx-2-ips-10.1177_01925121241302776 – Supplemental material for Gendered punishment? How the corruption of female politicians affects public opinion of female political leadership

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-2-ips-10.1177_01925121241302776 for Gendered punishment? How the corruption of female politicians affects public opinion of female political leadership by Byung-Deuk Woo, Mi-son Kim and Tracy Osborn in International Political Science Review

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Byung-Deuk Woo

Mi-son Kim

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Biographies

Byung-Deuk Woo is an assistant professor of the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the Incheon National University. His research interests mainly focus on gender and politics.

Mi-son Kim is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research interests focus on Korean politics,political parties,and public opinion.

Tracy Osborn is an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa. Her research interests focus on women and politics.

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