When Can Politicians Scare Citizens Into Supporting Bad Policies? A Theory of Incentives with Fear-Based Content

Lupia, Arthur and Menning, Jesse (2005): When Can Politicians Scare Citizens Into Supporting Bad Policies? A Theory of Incentives with Fear-Based Content.

Abstract

Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician can provide information about a threat. His statement need not be true. How citizens respond differs from most game-theoretic models – we proceed from more dynamic (and realistic) assumptions about how citizens react to fear. Our conclusions counter popular claims about how easily politicians use fear to manipulate citizens; yield different policy advice than does recent counterterrorism scholarship; and highlight issues (abstract, distant) and leaders (secretive) for which recent findings by political psychologists and public opinion scholars will – and will not – generalize.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Institution: University of Michigan
• Language: English
• Keywords: emotions; behavioral economics; game theory; political science; incentives
• Subjects: H - Public Economics > H3 - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents > H30 - General; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory > C72 - Noncooperative Games; D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D83 - Search ; Learning ; Information and Knowledge ; Communication ; Belief ; Unawareness

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