Abstract
Earlier research has offered much debate as to how anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm promote distinct tendencies toward threat perception, risk assessment, and political interest. Drawing on this research, this chapter experimentally tests whether the three targeted emotions cause different judgments concerning risk, perceived threat, and political learning. In line with the ongoing debate in political participation studies, this chapter also introduces internal efficacy as a moderating factor of emotions in political participation.
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Notes
- 1.
ISIS claimed the Suruç, Şanlıurfa bombing that killed 33 civilians, the bombings in Ankara that killed 102 civilians, the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 civilians, the January 2016 Istanbul bombing that killed 11 tourists, the 2016 Brussels bombings that killed over 30 civilians, the June 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando that killed 34 civilians followed by the attacks in Istanbul airport that killed 45 civilians, July 2016 attacks in Nice that claimed the lives of 84 civilians, and later on an attack in an Istanbul nightclub claiming the lives of 39 civilians on the New Year’s Eve.
- 2.
Turkey also maintains a small battalion in Bashiqa, near Mosul, for training purposes, as indicated by the public officials. Turkish military presence inside Iraq raised serious concerns as the Iraqi army and the Northern Iraqi forces (with the assistance of the international coalition members) initiated the Mosul offensive against ISIS in 2016.
- 3.
At the time of data collection, the AKP government was reluctant to engage in any conflict in Syria against ISIS. Despite pressure from the USA and other members of the international coalition fighting in Syria, Turkey kept its distance from militarized engagement before 2016. However, the government later reversed its policies in 2016 by sending the Turkish forces across the border into Syria. Thus, at the time of the study, risky policies, such as military engagement, sending Turkish troops into Syria, or creating a buffer zone, were not on the political agenda. In retrospect, the study hypothesized and properly tested the effects of emotion on risk-involving policies.
- 4.
I pretested the experimental stimuli used in this study with a student sample of 51 undergraduate students. Using the same manipulation material, the pretest first measured the degree of emotion evoked by the stimuli and second asked the participants to indicate how much they felt anger, anxiety, or enthusiasm from reading the experimental vignette. I found supporting evidence for both expectations that the emotion manipulations not only raised the targeted emotion with the particular treatment but also that the participants wrote considerations that associate with the targeted emotion in a particular treatment. In addition, I pretested the images used in the study to determine whether they were associated with the particular emotion they were intended to induce. This was done with a separate sample of 36 undergraduate students in a class.
- 5.
Manipulation check item asked which one of the following topics (uncertainties regarding ISIS, the brutality of ISIS, or the military operation against ISIS) was discussed in detail in the one-page report. Given the experimental treatment assigned to a participant, there was a single correct answer. Those who responded incorrectly were excluded from empirical analysis.
- 6.
Treating the familiar rewarding (enthusiasm) condition as the baseline in these analyses implies that the effect of the negative emotion is the difference between the enthusiasm condition and either the anxiety or anger condition.
- 7.
- 8.
There was no consistent effect of external efficacy on political participation across the studied domains in this chapter. Since external efficacy is not self-referential, it is theoretically reasonable to expect no effects on individual assessments of participation.
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Erisen, C. (2018). Emotions, Threat Perception, and Political Participation. In: Political Behavior and the Emotional Citizen. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58705-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58705-3_7
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