The Association Between Threat and Politics Depends on the Type of Threat, the Political Domain, and the Country

Abstract

Theories link threat with right-wing political beliefs. We use the World Values Survey (60,378 participants) to explore how six types of threat (e.g., economic, violence, and surveillance) are associated with multiple political beliefs (e.g., cultural, economic, and ideological identification) in 56 countries/territories. Multilevel models with individuals nested in countries revealed that the threat-political belief association depends on the type of threat, the type of political belief, and the country. Economic-related threats tended to be associated with more left-wing economic political beliefs and violence-related threats tended to be associated with more cultural right-wing beliefs, but there were exceptions to this pattern. Additional analyses revealed that the associations between threat and political beliefs were different across countries. However, our analyses identified few country characteristics that could account for these cross-country differences. Our findings revealed that political beliefs and perceptions of threat are linked, but that the relationship is not simple.

Trust in scientific information mediates associations between conservatism and coronavirus responses in the U.S., but few other nations

“…It is also worth noting that conservatism was, in many countries, positively associated with lockdown restrictions, perhaps resonating with authoritarian tendencies [see 30 ]. That said, the results from the U.S., Canada, and Indonesia also clearly suggest that, under the right circumstances, liberals can be more sensitive to certain threats than conservatives, in line with multidimensional approaches to understanding ideology and threat 13 , 38 , 39 .…”

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics

“…That is, belief systems are not just self-contained units, but are also affected by who we are and the social world that we are embedded in. This includes (but is not limited to) possible genetic predispositions to hold particular attitudes (e.g., Dawes & Weinschenk, 2020; Hatemi & McDermott, 2012; Kleppestø et al, 2019), perceptions of some threats (e.g., Brandt et al, 2021; Eadeh & Chang, 2020; Jost et al, 2017; Onraet et al, 2014), a person’s place in the social hierarchy (e.g., Brown-Iannuzzi et al, 2017), and longer term influences from the culture or political context (e.g., Conway et al, 2020). These process are likely mediated by a variety of cognitive (e.g., Zmigrod et al, 2018) and neural processes (Nam et al, 2018).…”

Of pathogens and party lines: Social conservatism positively associates with COVID-19 precautions among U.S. Democrats but not Republicans

“…Convergently, evolutionary modeling work has demonstrated that, at the group level, high degrees of objective threat favor the evolution of greater norm adherence [17]. However, the extent to which sensitivities to different categories of threats are associated with political ideology is contested [18], and the volume of evidence varies by threat domain. Pathogen threat is one of the most extensively studied domains, and socially liberal, less traditional individuals have consistently been found to be less pathogen-avoidant than their conservative counterparts [19][20][21].…”