Terrorist Threat, Male Stereotypes, and Candidate Evaluations

• Published in: Political research quarterly Vol. 69; no. 1; pp. 134 - 147
• Main Authors: Holman, Mirya R., Merolla, Jennifer L., Zechmeister, Elizabeth J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.03.2016; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Authorship; Candidates; Elections; Females; Gender; Leadership; Masculinity; National security; Partisanship; Political campaigns; Political candidates; Political leadership; Political parties; Political partisanship; Political research; Politicians; Politics; Sex; Stereotypes; Terrorism; Threat; United States; Women; Womens studies; United States > US; public opinion; threat; gender; terrorism; partisanship; experiments
• ISSN: 1065-9129; 1938-274X
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912915624018

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 expérimenta 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.