Do Women Make More Credible Threats? Gender Stereotypes, Audience Costs, and Crisis Bargaining

Abstract

As more women attain executive office, it is important to understand how gender dynamics affect international politics. Toward this end, we present the first evidence that gender stereotypes affect leaders’ abilities to generate audience costs. Using survey experiments, we show that female leaders have political incentives to combat gender stereotypes that women are weak by acting “tough” during international military crises. Most prominently, we find evidence that female leaders, and male leaders facing female opponents, pay greater inconsistency costs for backing down from threats than male leaders do against fellow men. These findings point to particular advantages and disadvantages women have in international crises. Namely, female leaders are better able to tie hands—an efficient mechanism for establishing credibility in crises. However, this bargaining advantage means female leaders will also have a harder time backing down from threats. Our findings have critical implications for debates over the effects of greater gender equality in executive offices worldwide.

Names from Nowhere? Fictitious Country Names in Survey Vignettes Affect Experimental Results

“…Experimental vignettes have employed a multitude of fictitious aspects and characters, such as fictitious regions ( Keller and Yang 2016 ), fictitious characters ( Caspi, Olekalns, and Druckman 2017 ;Balmas 2018 ;Schwartz and Blair 2020 ), non-state entities ( Garcia and Geva 2016 ), or fictitious op-eds ( Baele, Coan, and Sterck 2018 ). We focus on fictitious countries in particular for two reasons: (1) The state is central to most mainstream conceptions of the discipline and (perhaps therefore) and (2) the use of fictitious countries is a pervasive and easily traceable phenomenon in experimental IR research.…”

Gender, sexism, and war

“…succeeding in ways that defy gender norms (Heilman and Wallen, 2010) or requesting family leave (Rudman and Mescher, 2013). Schwartz and Blair (2020) show in a survey experiment that hypothetical male presidents suffer higher audience costs when they back down in an international crisis when facing a female leader adversary.…”

Untying Hands: De-escalation, Reputation, and Dynamic Audience Costs

“…Consider foreign policy crises where one state publicly threatens to intervene, which constitute the standard setting in most experiments on audience costs (Brutger 2021; Croco, Hanmer, and McDonald 2021; Davies and Johns 2013; Huddleston 2019; Kertzer and Brutger 2016; Levendusky and Horowitz 2012; Levy et al 2015; Li and Chen 2021; Lin-Greenberg 2019; Nomikos and Sambanis 2019; Quek 2017; Schwartz and Blair 2020; Tomz 2007; Trager and Vavreck 2011). How do opponents in the real world respond to public threats?…”