Terrorism, gender, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract

The 2016 U.S. election provides the opportunity to assess how gender, party, and experience shape candidate evaluations when terrorist threat is elevated. The presidential contest featured the first woman major party nominee (Hillary Clinton), a major party nominee without political experience (Donald Trump), and terrorism was salient. We argue that security threats dampen public confidence in Democratic women running for office, yet an experience advantage could countervail against those tendencies. We test expectations using the 2016 ANES and two experimental studies. We first affirm that individuals worried about terrorism held lower evaluations of Clinton and higher evaluations of Trump. We then test an active manipulation of the salience of national security experience and find that it mitigates Clinton's disadvantage, but only in the absence of a counter-message. The results underscore the difficulty that Democratic women face in overcoming the negative influence of party and gender stereotypes when running for office in times of terrorist threat.