Individualism and the legal status of prostitution

• Published in: Journal of Comparative Economics Vol. 52; no. 3; pp. 714 - 732
• Main Authors: Davis, Lewis S., Mavisakalyan, Astghik
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.09.2024
• Subjects: Economic status of women; Gender; Illegal markets; Individualism; Patriarchy; Prostitution; Regulation of sex; Sex work; Patriarchy; Z18; Prostitution; Economic status of women; K49; Individualism; Gender; Illegal markets; Sex work; Regulation of sex; J16
• ISSN: 0147-5967
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2024.07.001

•Prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries with a more individualist culture.•Individualism is associated with the greater acceptability of prostitution.•Prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries in which women have higher economic status, a finding that is consonant with the argument that prostitution is work.•Legal prostitution bears no systematic relationship to measures of historical patriarchy. We know very little about why the legal status of prostitution varies across countries. Drawing on central arguments in the normative literature on the legal status of prostitution, in which a central argument concerns the sexual and bodily autonomy of women, we ask whether a country's position on the individualism-collectivism affects the legal status of prostitution. We investigate this question using a panel of 61 countries, finding a robust positive relationship between individualism and the legality of prostitution. In the baseline model, a one-standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with a ten percentage point increase in the likelihood that prostitution is legal. This relationship is robust to controls for institutional structure, other dimensions of culture, and measures of women's economic status and historical patriarchy. It is also robust to the use of instrumental variable analysis to address issues of endogeneity and measurement error. Our results also shed light on two additional aspects of the normative debate over legal prostitution. In particular, we find that prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries in which women enjoy greater economic status, but we fail to find a consistent empirical relationship between historical patriarchy and legal prostitution.