POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY
In this paper I show that two popularly cited sources of bias against female politicians contending for high-status foreign policy roles in government, the gendered costs of filling “hard” policy domains such as foreign affairs, and quota penalties, are not immutable. First, in a candidate-choice experiment fielded on real-world Pakistani legislators, I show that biases against female politicians' candidacy to foreign policy legislative committees can be significantly offset by emphasizing candidate qualification. Second, in an experiment on Pakistani social media users, increasingly considered a captive base for the misogynist takedowns of female politicians, I show how hawkishness by female Foreign Ministers helps attenuate some of the credibility challenges associated with being on a reserved seat. These findings shed light on the kinds of information that may facilitate the elevation and success of female politicians vying for foreign policy roles.
JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH
Can representation in foreign policy deliberations – in particular, increased female representation – impact deliberators’ support for interstate conflict resolution? While existing work on gender representation in IR suggests that increased female representation should moderate intragroup hawkishness, making conflict resolution more viable, I offer empirical evidence that qualifies this idea, based on a survey experiment on 149 male and 55 female elite Pakistani legislators. Politicians of both sexes were randomly assigned to ‘listen in’ on a hypothetical national security deliberation that was either all-male or gender-mixed. I find that politicians’ decisionmaking in these hypothetical committees was informed simultaneously by notions of committee competence and by inferences about the social desirability of hawkish outcomes in deliberative settings. Specifically, respondents assigned to gender-mixed committees became less supportive of external conflict resolution. I show how different mechanisms accounted for this increased hawkishness for men and women. Female politicians assigned to gender-mixed committees became more conscious and wary of how their participation, the result of increased representation, would be perceived, compelling them to opt for more hawkish policies. Male politicians, in contrast, attempted to overcompensate for the increased visibility of female representation by resorting to greater levels of aggression.
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY
Existing work on the democratic accountability of foreign policy suggests that when an incumbent incurs foreign policy losses, including but not limited to standing down in a crisis, making costly compromises, or accepting defeat abroad, opposition politicians at home weigh criticizing the government with the national interest. But this work has largely been developed with a view to explaining oppositional behavior in consolidated democracies. I argue that while electorally competitive oppositions in weakly institutionalized regimes can and frequently do criticize elected incumbents for costly foreign policy reversals, they are less likely to do so if they believe this criticism may negatively affect democratic stability and potentially invite irregular leadership turnover, as this would prevent the opposition from coming into office. I find support for this hypothesis, which I term oppositional pragmatism, in a survey experiment on 430 political party workers affiliated with Pakistan's biggest political party and directionally consistent effects on a smaller but highly elite sample of 202 Pakistani legislators.