TY - JOUR
T1 - Voters versus terrorists
T2 - Analyzing the effect of terrorist events on voter turnout
AU - Robbins, Joseph
AU - Hunter, Lance
AU - Murray, Gregg R.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Cindy Rugeley, Frank Thames, Laron Williams, and the anonymous reviewers who offered important remarks on earlier versions of this paper. Joseph Robbins would like to thank Shepherd University for partially funding this project. All remaining errors remain our own.
PY - 2013/7
Y1 - 2013/7
N2 - Scholars and policymakers commonly assume terrorism is intended to affect a broader audience beyond the physically targeted victims. Informed by scholarship regarding the effects of heuristics and emotion on political cognition and behavior, we evaluate the impact of terrorism on the broader audience of the electorate as manifested by voter turnout. We hypothesize that increased terrorism is associated with increased voter turnout. In particular, we invoke the Affective Intelligence model and its related findings that emotion plays a key role in individuals' political cognition and behavior. Following this perspective, we argue that terrorist attacks are threatening and novel political events that induce anxiety in the electorate, which, in turn, leads individuals to scrutinize the political environment more closely and to ascribe greater salience to proximate political events. As a result of this increased concern with the political environment and increased salience of upcoming elections, we expect voter turnout to increase. While conventional explanations of turnout are important, they do not capture the effect of emotions despite other well-known relationships, such as attitudinal responses to international political crises (e.g. the rally-around-the-flag effect). Our cross-national analyses, which include 51 democracies and use two geographically and definitionally distinct datasets, indicate that the positive relationship between terrorism and turnout is non-trivial and robust.
AB - Scholars and policymakers commonly assume terrorism is intended to affect a broader audience beyond the physically targeted victims. Informed by scholarship regarding the effects of heuristics and emotion on political cognition and behavior, we evaluate the impact of terrorism on the broader audience of the electorate as manifested by voter turnout. We hypothesize that increased terrorism is associated with increased voter turnout. In particular, we invoke the Affective Intelligence model and its related findings that emotion plays a key role in individuals' political cognition and behavior. Following this perspective, we argue that terrorist attacks are threatening and novel political events that induce anxiety in the electorate, which, in turn, leads individuals to scrutinize the political environment more closely and to ascribe greater salience to proximate political events. As a result of this increased concern with the political environment and increased salience of upcoming elections, we expect voter turnout to increase. While conventional explanations of turnout are important, they do not capture the effect of emotions despite other well-known relationships, such as attitudinal responses to international political crises (e.g. the rally-around-the-flag effect). Our cross-national analyses, which include 51 democracies and use two geographically and definitionally distinct datasets, indicate that the positive relationship between terrorism and turnout is non-trivial and robust.
KW - affective intelligence model
KW - emotion
KW - terrorism
KW - voter turnout
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U2 - 10.1177/0022343313479814
DO - 10.1177/0022343313479814
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84880128107
SN - 0022-3433
VL - 50
SP - 495
EP - 508
JO - Journal of Peace Research
JF - Journal of Peace Research
IS - 4
ER -