Terrorist Threat, Male Stereotypes, and Candidate Evaluations
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 thr...
Saved in:
Published in | Political research quarterly Vol. 69; no. 1; pp. 134 - 147 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Los Angeles, CA
SAGE Publications
01.03.2016
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | 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. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1065-9129 1938-274X |
DOI: | 10.1177/1065912915624018 |