How does leader’s gender shape their incentives for war and peace?

• In Event: Poster Session: Conflict Processes II

Abstract

Experimental evidence demonstrates that hawkish leaders enjoy more public backing when they initiate rapprochement than doves, because the public perceives reconciliatory policy pursued by hawks as more sound and more moderate. This finding, however, ignores the stereotypes and biases that shape public’s evaluation of female leaders’ foreign policy decisions. This project incorporates the findings from experimental psychology and the comparative politics of gendered leadership to study how gender influences public evaluation of rapprochement by female hawkish versus dovish leaders. Employing a survey experiment, we first test the argument that female leaders, all else equal, are incentivized to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy than male executives. The experimental setting allows us to differentiate between the causal mechanisms of soundness vs. moderation. In addition, using observational data on the gender of leaders in militarized disputes and public approval of executives across the world (drawing on the Executive Approval Database), we find evidence of gender biases in how domestic publics evaluate leaders’ decisions to reconcile as opposed to escalate interstate crises. These findings spotlight to the role of cognitive biases in public evaluation of female leaders --- a factor that will gain further importance as more women become leading policymakers in foreign policy.

Authors

• Micala Gillespie

• Anna O. Pechenkina, Utah State University