Gender and Perceptions of Security Forces: Experimental Evidence from Iran

• In Event: Women’s Political, Economic, and Social Lives in Muslim-Majority Countries

Abstract

Security forces play a critical role in ensuring public safety, but their effectiveness and legitimacy depend in part on how citizens perceive them. In recent years, scholars have increasingly explored how factors such as gender, race, and militarization shape citizen perceptions of security forces. While several studies demonstrate that in democracies, the presence of women police officers improve public perceptions of the police, less is known how citizens will react to women police in a relatively more conservative and authoritarian setting, where security personnel are selected based on ideological proximity to the ruling regime. While gender stereotypes lead women tend to be viewed as relatively less likely to engage in violence and corruption and may be viewed as better able to address sexual and gender-based violence, these expectations may be tempered by women’s presence in relatively more militarized units or their attire, which may indicate that they are more personally conservative. Using a conjoint survey experiment in Iran, this project explores how the gender of security force personnel as well as their affiliation to different units/forces and their attire – which signal their political or religious ideology -- affect citizen perceptions of effectiveness, trust, and legitimacy of security forces. As a theocratic state, the Islamic Republic of Iran is deeply influenced by Islamic principles and values, which can shape citizen perceptions of security forces in complex and sometimes controversial ways. This makes Iran a particularly interesting case for studying the relationship between gender, affiliation, and attire of security personnel and citizen perceptions to test the generalizability of results found in more democratic, and liberal states. As authoritarian regimes have increasingly put women in public roles to create a guise of democratic reform and as the public in authoritarian regimes express discontent with the security forces, it is imperative to understand how the public reacts to descriptive representation in the police and military.

Authors

• Roya Izadi, University of Rhode Island

• Laura Huber, University of Mississippi