Terrorist Threat, Male Stereotypes, and Candidate Evaluations

Abstract

How does the threat of terrorism affect evaluations of female (vs. male) political leaders, and do these effects vary by the politician's partisanship? Using two national surveys, we document a propensity for the U.S. public to prefer male Republican leadership the most in times of security threat, and female Democratic leadership the least. We theorize a causal process by which terrorist threat influences the effect of stereotypes on candidate evaluations conditional on politician partisanship. We test this framework with an original experiment:a nationally representative sample was presented with a mock election that varied the threat context and the gender and partisanship of the candidates. We find that masculine stereotypes have a negative influence on both male and female Democratic candidates in good times (thus reaffirming the primacy of party stereotypes), but only on the female Democratic candidate when terror threat is primed. Republican candidates-both male and female-are unaffected by masculine stereotypes, regardless of the threat environment.

The Effects of Counterstereotypic Gender Strategies on Candidate Evaluations

“…Female candidates, for example, who fail to campaign on feminine issues when their male opponents campaign on these issues, may face a backlash (Windett, ). Other contexts find that voters reward female candidates for displaying masculine traits and behaviors during a national security crisis (Holman et al, ). Future work should build on these findings to identify the different political contexts that may affect the value of counterstereotypes for female candidates and politicians.…”

Can experience overcome stereotypes in times of terror threat?

“…In an experimental study (2011) in which terrorism is primed, they find a modest positive effect of a terror threat on evaluations of Condoleezza Rice, but a negative effect on evaluations of Hillary Clinton (prior to her experience as Secretary of State). In later work, through the use of fictitious candidates, they more robustly show that Republican female leaders do not suffer when terrorism is salient, while Democratic female leaders do (Holman et al 2016).…”

“…Absent other information, many assume that male politicians are more capable of handling issues related to security, such as war, military affairs, foreign policy, terrorism, and crime (e.g. Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993;Holman et al, 2016; but see Schneider and Bos, 2014).…”

“…Holman et al (2011Holman et al ( , 2016 argue that because of the tendency for the public to assign greater competency to the Republican party when it comes to national security issues, Republican affiliation has the potential to mitigate against the tendency for the public to devalue certain female leaders in times of security threat. In an experimental study (2011) in which terrorism is primed, they find a modest positive effect of a terror threat on evaluations of Condoleezza Rice, but a negative effect on evaluations of Hillary Clinton (prior to her experience as Secretary of State).…”

“…Yet, some scholarship suggests that certain factors could countervail against such general tendencies. One of these is partisanship: Republican women leaders may be immunized against the negative effects of terrorist threat on evaluations of female leaders (Holman et al, 2011(Holman et al, , 2016. Another is relevant leadership experience (Swers, 2007).…”