Opportunity factors, marriage, and the experience of corruption: Revisiting gender and public attitudes toward corruption and tax evasion

This study extends the literature on the causes of gender differences in attitudes toward unlawful behavior. Following the work of Torgler and Valev (2010), data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS) are used to see if gender differences in attitudes toward corruption and tax evasion are affected by opportunities to commit crime, an individual's marital status, and the level of corruption in a country. Probit and ordered probit methods applied to data spanning three waves of the WVS and EVS from 1994–2007 for twenty-one counties from Europe, Asia, and South America show that opportunities to commit crime explain variation in attitudes toward corruption and tax evasion, but do not completely explain gender differences in these attitudes. In addition, the empirical evidence suggests that there are larger gender differences in attitudes toward corruption and tax evasion in countries with lower levels of corruption.