Women Leaders and Counterterrorism: A Political Catch-22?

A growing body of literature has begun examining the foreign and domestic policies of women chief executives, that is, women serving as head of government. The general framework of this literature is that women leaders face a political double bind that affects their behavior, they must be both masculine and feminine (Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Burns and Murdie 2018; Post and Sen 2020; Schwartz and Blair 2020). In particular, they are masculine in the international arena and feminine towards their own constituents. Moreover, past research finds that women leaders may face higher rates of domestic terrorism. Burns and Kattelman (2017) argue that women chief executives face a catch-22 in responding to domestic terrorism because a hard-lined response violates stereotypes, leading terrorists to potentially use gendered stereotypes in their decision-making process on whether to stage an attack or not. In other words, this creates a potential domestic emergency. What happens when they need to enact counterterrorism policies during times of heightened terrorism that violate the double bind? We posit that women leaders will take a hard-lined stance against terrorist violence, but that they will face some constituent backlash for violating gendered stereotypes creating a glass cliff. We argue that it is important to understand the domestic processes of audience costs that affect women leaders and their policy choices in order to better understand the impact of gendered expectations on leadership. Our project examines the cases of Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, and Violeta Chamorro.