Politicians regularly sound alarm bells. To listen to contemporary political debates, immigrants are taking hard-working Americans’ jobs, terrorists are getting past our defenses, and we are irreversibly destroying our environment for future generations. It is a very dangerous world. If we think back to two of the most memorable presidential advertisements, LBJ's 1964 Daisy ad and the 1988 Willie Horton ad, both have strong elements of fear. The Daisy ad confronts viewers with a nuclear war while the Willie Horton ad warns of a world where lax law enforcement allows dangerous criminals out on weekend passes. Both ads are designed to scare viewers and urge them to choose the safer option. Our purpose here is not to evaluate the veracity of any particular threats but to evaluate how people react to political alarms. In previous chapters, we explored the effects of anxiety on learning and trust and found that anxiety biases learning and the kinds of leaders that we trust in systematic ways. So far, we have not addressed the basic public opinion question – what sorts of policies do anxious people support? This final empirical chapter is devoted to the attitudinal consequences of anxiety.

We argue that anxiety can trigger support for protective measures. In each section, we draw specific hypotheses about how protection is manifest across the four policy areas: public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change. Policies can be considered protective based on the quality of the policy, because political leaders frame them as such, or because few opposing policies effectively challenge them. These four cases provide examples of policy areas with clear best protective practices (public health) and where elite frames shape views of what constitutes protection (immigration, terrorism, climate change). These policies also vary in their connection to partisan politics. How to tackle disease outbreaks is less contentious on partisan grounds than is the best way to stem illegal immigration flows or prevent future terrorist attacks, where “best practices” tend to depend on the party advocating the policy. In three of the policy areas (immigration, terrorism, climate change), one party's ownership creates an advantage for its preferred protective policy.

Emotions matter in politics – enthusiastic supporters return politicians to office, angry citizens march in the streets, a fearful public demands protection from the government. Yet, in much of Western political thought, emotions are either ignored or derided as destructive to democracy. Until recently, scholarship in political science paid little sustained attention to how emotions such as anxiety affect political life, focusing instead on the cognitive and rational aspects of politics. We explore the emotional life of politics in this book, with particular emphasis on how political anxieties affect public life. When the world is scary, when politics is passionate, when the citizenry is anxious, does this politics resemble politics under more serene conditions? If politicians use threatening appeals to motivate and persuade citizens, how does the public respond?

Throughout this book, we show that political anxiety triggers engagement in politics and that it does so in ways that are potentially both promising and damaging for democracy. Using four substantive policy areas (public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change), we demonstrate that anxiety triggers learning, but it also prioritizes attention to threatening information. Anxiety can push citizens toward trusting the government in times of crisis, but this can leave people open to manipulation. We also find that political anxiety increases support for protective and potentially anti-democratic policies. Anxiety about politics triggers coping strategies in the political world, where these strategies are often shaped by partisan agendas.

This book provides a fuller picture of anxiety in politics and gets us closer to reconciling the current normative appreciation of anxiety with the political uses of anxiety. Emotions like anxiety may benefit citizens by increasing attention and making political choices easier, but we doubt that political elites and the news media evoke fear in order to create better citizens. Democratic citizenship in an anxious world can be a deeper, more informed citizenship. Without a full spectrum of voices from partisan political elites, though, anxious citizens in search of protection from threats to their health and way of life may support charlatans or madmen who offer bodily protection while destroying the body politic.

How does anxiety affect information processing? We argue that anxious citizens are motivated to seek political information but are attracted to threatening news. Anxiety serves to motivate learning by increasing interest, the desire for information, and information gathering itself (Brader 2005, 2006; Gross 2009; Marcus and MacKuen 1993; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000). In a public where the average person has little factual knowledge about politics (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996), political appeals that increase individuals’ anxiety can increase political knowledge and help people come closer to the democratic ideal of engaged citizens. Previous research finds that anxiety motivates citizens to learn about politics, but the act of simply gathering more information may not necessarily create better democratic citizens. We know very little about the kind of information that anxious citizens pay attention to or how they engage with political information. If anxious citizens seek more information but demonstrate biases in information processing, then the consequences of anxiety for citizen learning are more complex than suggested by political commentators and previous work on emotion and politics.

In the realm of politics, some issues may be inherently threatening, whereas others are framed threats and may be made threatening by news media and strategic campaigns. The contemporary political debate over undocumented immigration in the United States is infused with these framed threats – the threat that “illegals” pose to Americans’ economic well-being, their security, and their way of life are all evident in campaign advertisements and candidate speeches. Politicians, political pundits, and some political thinkers regularly sound alarm bells about the dire effects of immigration on the economic health and cultural fabric of the United States (Borjas 1999; Huntington 2004). To test the consequences of anxiety on political learning, we use Immigration KN Study 2007. The American public is torn on immigration policy, but a significant portion of the public believes that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, burden the country's economy and social system (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2006c) and worry about the consequences of immigration. Our hypothesis testing in this chapter is confined to the immigration study, but we expect that same dynamics would play out across other issue areas.

A survey of American politics offers an embarrassment of riches when looking for anxiety. Anxiety appears to be everywhere, especially during campaign seasons. Terrorist attacks, crime waves, not to mention economic downturns, are just a few of the many areas of politics that are infused with anxiety. We chose four areas to focus on in our research: immigration, public health, terrorism, and climate change. Our case selection was driven first by a very practical concern: the policy areas had to trigger anxiety at least among a subset of the population. Then, we sought variation on two important dimensions for our theory: (1) whether the issue is inherently threatening or threatening dependent on framing and (2) the partisan dimensions of the issue (e.g., whether anxiety is concentrated on the left, the right, or spread among the population evenly, and whether a party is more closely associated with the issue). Public health crises and terrorist threats trigger widespread anxiety (although as these issues move further away from the crisis moment, they often become politicized). On the other hand, climate change tends to trigger more anxiety on the left, and immigration worries are more prevalent on the right. This variation is used to demonstrate the potential for and limits on anxiety as a persuasive tool. In subsequent chapters, we use experiments to study the relationship between anxiety and three coping mechanisms (learning, trust, and attitudes) across these different issue areas.

Our goal in this chapter is to offer an overview of our substantive cases. We begin by explaining our choice of policy areas and the important dimensions on which they differ. We also establish that each case has been the subject of considerable anxiety for the mass public through survey data. Finally, we describe our approach to studying the effects of anxiety on the mass public. We use three different experimental techniques to generate anxiety: (1) thought listings, (2) news stories, and (3) campaign ads. Together, these offer a full picture of how anxiety can affect the ways that citizens engage with politics.

ANXIETY-INDUCING THREATS

Societal upheavals, epidemics, wars, and campaigns possess the ability to force the public to stop, pay attention, and react emotionally. Some events are obvious and widely recognized as threats. Events that evoke dread and fear of death, that seem uncontrollable, that have catastrophic consequences for individuals and society (Lichtenstein et al. 1978) can create anxious feelings for everyone.

Contemporary American political life abounds with crises and worry. Terrorist attacks, a warming planet, and flu pandemics all trigger the public's anxieties. Meanwhile, politicians use fears of economic downturns and cultural changes to evoke the public's worries about immigration. Given that politics often involves anxiety, in this book, we ask how and when is anxiety successful at causing citizens to engage with politics? In addition, we ask what is the substance of that political engagement?

Political thinkers and democratic theorists express concern that anxiety may undercut citizens’ abilities to make rational political choices, yet recent research from political science and psychology paints a more hopeful picture of anxiety, suggesting that political fears may lead to more knowledgeable and trusting citizens. Our theoretical contribution reconciles the normatively attractive portrait of anxiety in recent political science literature with the uses of fear in contemporary politics. We use four policy areas to test how anxiety shapes citizens’ engagement with political information and political trust. Together, these components paint a fuller picture of the ways that anxiety shapes political life than accounts that either simply vilify or praise the role of emotion in politics. Anxiety does not preclude man or nation from acting or thinking sanely, but “under the influence of great fear” the public is likely to support protective policies that may undercut democracy.

Throughout the course of the book, we find that political anxiety systematically shapes citizen engagement by encouraging attention to politics and increasing acceptance of leaders and policies framed as able to protect the public. Political anxiety leads citizens to learn more about politics, but anxious citizens are systematically drawn to threatening news. Political anxiety increases trust in political actors, but trust is confined to those actors seen as useful for handling the source of the anxiety. Political anxiety makes people more likely to take protective policy positions, and the dominant protective policies are shaped both by partisanship of individuals and the partisan politics around the issues. An anxious politics both helps citizens to reach a democratic ideal of an informed, interested polity and leaves the public open to manipulation. In this chapter, we consider what this book contributes to the study of political psychology and emotion in public life. We also reflect on when anxiety strengthens democracy and when it may undermine democracy.

“THE MOST FEARED DISEASE”

In summer 1916, the United States experienced its first major outbreak of polio, a viral disease that mainly affected children, leaving survivors with paralysis and wasted limbs. Concentrated around New York City, the outbreak would claim 27,000 lives before running its course. As historian David Oshinsky noted, polio was

the most feared disease of the middle part of the 20th century. It was a children's disease; there was no prevention; there was no cure; every child everywhere was at risk. And what this really meant was that parents were absolutely frantic. And what they tried to do was to protect their children the best way they could. (Dentzer 2005)

Anxiety surrounding the disease led to demand for public policies to combat the outbreak along with private behaviors to avoid contraction. With the cause of the disease shrouded in mystery, the public initially blamed Italian immigrants for the 1916 outbreak, focusing on their hygiene. Anxious parents cautioned their children not go swimming in pools or lakes (Youngdahl 2012). Armed police patrolled roads and rails around New York to ensure that travelers could prove their children were polio-free (Oshinsky 2006, 20–22).

In the wake of these disease outbreaks, politicians advocated public health policies to protect the public from polio. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who himself was afflicted with the disease, launched a campaign against polio through the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The campaign, more commonly known as the March of Dimes, called for citizens to send their dimes directly to the president. In 1938, that effort would yield more than two and half million dimes in addition to bills and checks. Such was the popular nature of the fight against polio that politicians of both parties sought to be associated with it. For example, in 1954, Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon was famously photographed pumping gas in a fundraising effort for the fight, “Fill ’Er Up for Polio” (Oshinsky 2006). In 1955, those efforts bore fruit, and a vaccine was created that was rolled out nationwide by the Eisenhower administration to rid the United States of this deadly disease.

In this chapter, we explore the effects of anxiety on political trust. We argue that one method that citizens use to cope with the uncertainty and negative affect that underlie political anxiety is to turn toward political actors who can provide information and advocate policies that will protect them from threats. Higher levels of distress make people less confident in their preferences and political choices (Druckman and McDermott 2008; Loewenstein et al. 2001), making trust in external actors more appealing. Particularly when those actors possess some expertise based on their training, office, or access to information, they are especially appealing. By putting trust in political actors who are perceived to be knowledgeable and expert, citizens motivated to lower anxiety can start to feel better. Like the Biblical Israelites, Americans who are afraid want to put their trust in actors who can effectively protect them, but, rather than turning solely to the Lord, modern citizens might choose to put their trust in government experts.

We use public health and immigration as two cases where anxiety may influence citizens’ trust in a variety of public actors. By focusing on which actors citizens turn toward when anxiety is high, we explore whether anxiety-driven trust is targeted or diffuse and to what extent partisanship plays a role. We argue that anxiety may either increase or decrease trust, depending on whether the political actor is seen as responsible for the anxiety. We also argue that anxiety-driven trust is targeted. Anxious citizens do not simply become more trusting in the political system as a whole; they selectively trust in expert actors, those with relevant power and experience to alleviate threats. Who those relevant actors are depends on the threat. When threats come from outside the government, anxious citizens may become more trusting of a host of political actors with relevant expertise. When threats are perceived to originate from government failings, though, the political context may be more polarized, and partisanship may shape which actors are seen as relevant. When threats come from government action (or inaction), citizens may then turn toward actors who are relevant to or “own” the policy area (Petrocik 1996) because they are seen as the party most competent to execute policies to ease these threats.