Gender, Media Evaluation, and Security Crises
Are Leaders Framed in a Gender-Biased Way When Addressing External Security Threats, and If So, How? (JMP)
This project examines how international security crises are associated with changes in how political leaders are evaluated in the media. Focusing on repeated external security challenges faced by national leaders, the project explores whether evaluative narratives differ systematically across leaders and contexts. The analysis draws on an original corpus of domestic and international news coverage and applies text-as-data and machine learning approaches to characterize patterns in framing and tone. Rather than testing a single mechanism, the project maps how multiple dimensions of evaluation shift during crisis periods.
Information and Gender Bias in Leadership Evaluation
Are gender stereotypes about female leaders in security leadership positions immutable?
The project examines how the public processes counter-stereotypical factual information when evaluating leadership competence in a policy domain strongly associated with masculinity and elite expertise. Existing research has extensively examined motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and gender stereotypes independently. Still, we know less about how individuals update evaluations of elite political competence in high-stakes security domains when confronted with information that challenges preexisting stereotypes. The project, therefore, examines the conditions under which factual information succeeds, fails, or produces resistance and backfire effects in evaluations of security leadership.
Gender, Strategy, and Political Survival under Threat
When Gender, Strategy and Blame Collide:
Conjunctural Causes of Political Removal under Security Threats
This project explores how leaders’ strategic responses to external security threats relate to political accountability and survival. The study examines how crisis management strategies interact with gendered expectations to shape post-crisis evaluations and political outcomes. Drawing on original leader-level data and media-based indicators, the project focuses on patterns of accountability rather than specific causal pathways. The goal is to better understand how gender shapes the political risks leaders face during periods of heightened security concern.
Female Leadership and Environmental Action in International Institutions
Co-author: Callista Chim
This project examines how female leadership shapes environmental policy preferences and outcomes in international economic institutions. Focusing on trade agreements and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the study explores whether gendered leadership preferences are reflected in the design and implementation of environmental commitments. Using UNGA speech data and original data on environmental clauses in trade agreements and institutional participation in SDG-related processes, the project analyzes how leadership composition relates to variation in environmental provisions and policy outcomes. Rather than treating gender representation as symbolic, the project investigates how leadership roles within international institutions are associated with substantive environmental action. The findings speak to broader debates on gender, institutional design, and global environmental governance.