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

Arthur Lupia and Jesse Menning

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians can use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve self-serving outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician provides 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 think. Our conclusions counter popular claims about how easily politicians use fear to manipulate citizens, yield different policy advice than does recent scholarship on counterterrorism, and highlight issues (abstract, distant) and leaders (secretive) for which recent findings by political psychologists and public opinion scholars will – and will not – generalize.

Keywords: emotions; behavioral economics; game theory; political science; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D83 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005, Revised 2006-09-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-soc
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102/1/MPRA_paper_102.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1028/1/MPRA_paper_1028.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1048/1/MPRA_paper_1048.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:102

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