Female Leaders and Gender Bias on the Use of Force

• In Event: Leader-Centric Approaches to Conflict Processes

Abstract

Does gender of leaders matter in international politics? Despite the dizzying number of media coverage on this subject, very few studies address this question. Our study addresses this concern by investigating how the gender of a leader shapes voter support for the use of military force. Specifically, we examine two distinct mechanisms: gender punishment bias, women face greater punishment than men, and gender stereotyping, unconscious bias against women. In the former, we field two separate survey experiments that replicate the well-known domestic audience costs experiment and a separate scenario on failed UN military mission that varies the gender of the UN commander. For the latter mechanism, we replicate a nuclear crisis scenario involving a foreign leader. We manipulate the gender of the target as well in this vignette. All three survey experiments were fielded using Amazon Mechanical Turk with sample sizes of 1,600, 1,748, and 1,560, respectively. We find that voters do not exhibit gender punishment bias; that is, for failing to follow through on threats or failing on a mission, female leaders do not face greater punishment. However, individual subjects do display strong proscriptions against using force on female leaders who develop nuclear weapons irrespective of regime type. Taken together, these results suggest that female leaders suffer less from domestic audience costs from their own people but may suffer from external domestic audience costs. Moreover, this study has implications to the broader international relations literature by uncovering which mechanisms drive the effect of gender on leadership.

Authors

• Wilfred Ming Chow, University of Hong Kong

• Kai Quek, University of Hong Kong