Women in the Executive Branch: Perceptions and Performance

Abstract

As more and more women shatter glass ceilings and enter the highest echelon of national government as presidents, prime ministers and other cabinet ministers, political scientists are better able to empirically assess both popular perceptions of women executives and their actual performance in office. This panel explores gendered dimensions of the executive branch including public assessments of prime ministers and members of their cabinet as well as how men and women cabinet members perform their duties. Kroeber et al compare legislative oversight of men and women cabinet members. Claveria investigates how the gender stereotypes associated with various cabinet portfolios lead voters to discriminatory evaluations of women ministers’ performance. Davidson-Schmich et al’s paper similarly assesses how gendered perceptions impact women leaders leading during natural disasters. The two other papers delve into women executives’ performance in office, asking whether they are more likely to engage in cooperative or conflictual foreign trade policy behavior and whether they provide substantive representation to marginalized groups while in office. Our panel includes a diverse array of scholars, empirical cases, and research methods. The authors of the papers come from North America (Canada and the United States) and Europe (Spain and Austria) and range in career experience from graduate students to senior scholars. The empirical foci of the papers include cases from Latin America, Europe and Oceana. Methods employed include qualitative content analysis, experiments, text-as-data, and vector autoregression.

Title	Details
Gender stereotypes in citizens’ preferences for cabinet positions	View Paper Details
Gender, Crisis, and Leadership: Natural Disasters in Germany, New Zealand, and Chile	View Paper Details
Women Leaders, Trade, Conflict, and Cooperation: How Cooperative are Women?	View Paper Details
Does Descriptive Representation in Cabinets Produce Representation of Historically Marginalized Groups? An Empirical Test in Costa Rica	View Paper Details