When Terror Strikes, Voters Don't Rally Around Women—The Theresa May Case

🔎 What This Paper Asks

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorist attacks produce public “rally” support for incumbent executives. This study asks whether that pattern holds when the executive is a woman, focusing on right-leaning UK Prime Minister Theresa May—an incumbent with security credentials—after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.

🧭 Theory: A Gender-Revised Rally Framework

A gender-informed revision of rally theory predicts the public will be less inclined to rally around women after terrorist attacks. The framework links existing research on rally effects with scholarship on gender and political leadership to explain why gendered expectations and biases can blunt—or reverse—typical post-crisis boosts.

📍 Evidence From the Manchester Attack (Natural Experiment)

• Exploits the 2017 Manchester Arena attack as a natural experiment to assess causal change in public evaluations.
• Finds no rally for Theresa May; instead, evaluations of the prime minister decline after the attack.
• The declines are especially sharp among respondents holding negative views about women in politics.
• Electoral consequences observed: May’s party lost votes in areas geographically closer to the attack.

🌐 A Multinational Check

• A broader, multinational test shows corroborating patterns consistent with the gender-revised theory: women leaders do not reliably receive post-attack rallies across contexts.

⭐ Why This Matters

• Demonstrates that conventional rally theory is incomplete: gender of the executive conditions public responses to terrorism.
• Implies real political costs for women leaders in crisis settings—both in public approval and in nearby electoral outcomes—challenging assumptions about universal incumbent advantage after terror events.