Search

Menacing news inclines individuals to acquire information, and research has explored how emotional reactions such as fear or anger condition this process. While scholars have debated the relevance of fear and anger for levels of attentiveness and learning in politics, fewer studies consider how variation in emotional responses can shape the substance of information searches in times of threat. We posit that heightened fear motivates interest in defense-oriented information among threatened individuals, while heightened anger motivates interest in aggression-oriented information. To test these hypotheses, we focus on international terrorist threat because of its known tendency to elevate both anger and fear. We use data that permit a behavioral measure of information seeking, via an experiment embedded within a Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) platform. Within this information-rich context, exposure to terrorist threat motivates a search for relevant information. Furthermore, we find that while an induction to elevate anger prompts more immediate attention to aggression-oriented information, an induction to elevate fear is more effective in steering attention toward defense-oriented information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project examines the extent to which terrorist threat shapes affect assessments of female political leadership and whether these assessments are affected by the characteristics of the evaluated leader. Using experimental and survey data, we find that conditions of terrorist threat increase the expression of certain gender-trait stereotypes and negatively affect evaluations of female Democratic leaders. Our analysis further suggests that Republican women and/or those with strong national security experience may be able to overcome the otherwise negative implications of security threats and gender-trait stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 U.S. election provides the opportunity to assess how gender, party, and experience shape candidate evaluations when terrorist threat is elevated. The presidential contest featured the first woman major party nominee (Hillary Clinton), a major party nominee without political experience (Donald Trump), and terrorism was salient. We argue that security threats dampen public confidence in Democratic women running for office, yet an experience advantage could countervail against those tendencies. We test expectations using the 2016 ANES and two experimental studies. We first affirm that individuals worried about terrorism held lower evaluations of Clinton and higher evaluations of Trump. We then test an active manipulation of the salience of national security experience and find that it mitigates Clinton's disadvantage, but only in the absence of a counter-message. The results underscore the difficulty that Democratic women face in overcoming the negative influence of party and gender stereotypes when running for office in times of terrorist threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]