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.
Highlights
The world can be a threatening place
There are likely specific conditions under which there is a robust link between threat and right-wing political beliefs, we suspect that when broader samples of (a) types of political beliefs, (b) types of threat, and (c) populations of participants are taken into account the link will be more fragile
To estimate the overall associations between threat and politics, we regressed each of the five political belief measures on the six threat measures in multilevel models with random intercepts and random slopes for the countries
Summary
The world can be a threatening place. There are wars, pandemics, malicious governments, organized crime syndicates, job losses, educational struggles, food insecurities, natural disasters, and petty crimes. Consistent with the motivated social cognition approach, a recent meta-analysis across multiple measures of fear and existential threat finds that the association between threat and right-wing beliefs was small-to-moderate (depending on the precise measure; Jost et al, 2017; see Onraet, Van Hiel, Dhont, & Pattyn, 2013). We build on this work by expanding the types of threat and examining the joint influence of the types of threat, types of political beliefs, and countries simultaneously This helps identify the variability in the link between threat and politics across these three factors. When researchers focus on a narrow range of stimuli or samples, heterogeneity between stimuli or samples is often missed and the size and consistency of effects are likely to be overestimated
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