When Can Politicians Scare Citizens Into Supporting Bad Policies? Strategy and Emotion in an Equilibrium of Fear
نویسندگان
چکیده
Emotions affect politics. So does strategic behavior. But studies of how emotions affect politics tend not to account for strategic behavior -and vice versa. Such practices limit our understanding of emotions’ political relevance. We pursue a constructive integration. Using a formal model, we identify conditions under which a strategic political leader will use fear to induce citizens to support bad policies. We build the model from empirical premises about fear and why unwarranted fears persist. We then identify an equilibrium of fear -an interactive relationship between automatic, unconditional cognitive phenomena and conscious adaptations to external incentives. The equilibrium distinguishes moments at which a politician can scare citizens into accepting policies that they would otherwise reject from moments at which he has no such power. Other findings clarify issues (abstract and distant) and leaders (secretive) for which current emotions-in-politics insights best apply.
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