Scientists Find Hypothesis Does Not Drive All Types Fear

When people are afraid, they are more likely to vote for politicians or parties on the fringes of the political spectrum. This is a common hypothesis. Scientists from the University of Mannheim have now found that the hypothesis does not apply to all types of fear, but that the political context of the fear seems to be decisive.

Discussions in the media suggest that fear is driving voters towards more right-wing political stances. Some politicians on the right-wing political spectrum also appear to deliberately incite fear in their political campaigns: Former US President Donald Trump, for example, has been accused of doing so. Previous studies had also shown that issues such as increasing immigration, alienating globalization, and the threat of terrorism can trigger such fears and influence political opinion.

The psychologists Ulrich Müller and Prof. Dr. Georg W. Alpers, together with the political scientist Oke Bahnsen, have now investigated in a laboratory experiment whether fear that is not connected to political issues can also influence political attitudes. To do this, they triggered states of anxiety in the subjects that had no political connotation whatsoever, and observed whether these fears influenced the political attitudes of the participants in the experiment. “Our results clearly show that anxiety by itself does not influence political attitudes. This means that the tendency to vote left or right of the political center seems to depend on a political context of the threat,” summarizes Ulrich Müller.