Administration & Society

Female representation in government has long been advocated for promoting good governance, and its potential effect on corruption has attracted sustained scholarly attention. Yet theoretical reasoning and evidence remain fragmented and contested. This preregistered meta-analysis, synthesizing 588 effect sizes from 57 quantitative studies, confirms a statistically significant negative association between female representation and corruption. It further shows that this effect is larger in studies using subjective corruption measures, descriptive representation, only one type of female representation, and excluding country-fixed effects. The results advance our understanding of how and when female representation influences corruption and offer insights for anti-corruption policies.

Scholars have expressed frustration that public policy formulation sometimes proceeds with optimism that lies in stark contrast to the evaluation literature. We present theoretical insights from the rules of evidence that cast greater light on why this might be so. We also conduct novel sophisticated empirical analysis – based on a natural experiment in New South Wales, Australia – to better measure the efficiency outcomes at the heart of most amalgamation proposals. We conclude with our thoughts on the important normative measures, derived from rules of evidence, that might be operationalised to avoid injustice and enhance accountability in the future.

This study conducted a systematic literature review of 15 articles on local government reporting on sustainable development goals (SDG), published in Scopus-indexed journals between 2015 and 2025. The findings reveal that research on this topic is relatively limited, with most papers appearing since 2023. Research is predominantly grounded in institutional and legitimacy theory. Empirical studies focusing on Southern European countries dominate the literature. The studies report low levels of SDG reporting and inconsistent findings relating to its drivers. The analysis highlights the need for scholarship into the integration of SDGs in municipal reporting practices, offering guidance to researchers, regulators, and policymakers to enhance SDG reporting.