As the range of rockets launched from Gaza kept growing, some Israeli towns fell within the threat radius and others stayed outside it, almost by chance, depending on where they happened to sit on the map. That gave two researchers, Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff, something rare in the social sciences: a natural experiment with real votes attached. Would the fear of attacks actually move how people voted? The result was clear-cut. Towns that entered rocket range increased their support for right-wing parties by 2 to 6 percentage points compared to towns that stayed out of range [1]. This was counted votes, compared before and after the threat became real for those people.
The interesting part is that this isn’t an isolated case. It’s one of the best-documented patterns in all of political psychology, and what makes it interesting is that it arrives at the same conclusion through completely different routes: natural experiments with real attacks, lab experiments with digitally manipulated faces, representative surveys during wars and pandemics. The conclusion, stated plainly, is this: when a threat is perceived as real, politics hardens. Support rises for harder, more nationalist, more order-focused positions, and preference rises for leaders who present themselves as strong. This has been measured in Israel [1][2], in Spain [3], in cross-national surveys during covid-19 [4], and in lab experiments using a design completely different from the one that made this field famous, as you’ll see below. Four methods, four contexts, the same direction.
Here’s the thing: fear doesn’t manufacture authoritarianism out of nothing, it wakes it up where it was already dormant. Political scientist Karen Stenner has spent two decades defending, with plenty of evidence behind her, a model that runs against common sense: within any population there’s a group of people with a stronger need for uniformity, social consensus, and respected leadership, and that need stays dormant as long as the environment feels stable.
What activates that predisposition isn’t just any scare, but what she calls normative threat: perceiving leaders as unworthy of respect, or sensing that there’s no longer consensus around the group’s shared values [5]. When that threat appears, people who carry the predisposition become far more intolerant; people who don’t carry it, curiously, tend to move in the opposite direction, toward more openness — in other words: both ends move further toward their respective political extremes. This predisposition isn’t the property of any one political side. A study during the covid-19 pandemic, with samples in Ireland, the UK, and the United States, found that perceived threat from the virus predicted authoritarian attitudes through an increase in national identification, and in the US sample that link between threat and authoritarianism was actually stronger among people leaning progressive than among conservatives [4]. Fear doesn’t pick a side — left and right alike become more authoritarian and less democratic under it.
There’s a second, independent line of evidence that arrives at the same place from evolutionary psychology. When people perceive conflict between groups, the type of body they want in a leader literally changes. Lasse Laustsen and Michael Bang Petersen, using digitally manipulated faces made to look more or less dominant, showed across several experiments that people specifically prefer leaders with more dominant facial features in contexts of intergroup conflict, and prefer leaders with warmer, more prestige-based features in contexts of cooperation [6]. This has been replicated with different methods — lab experiments, representative surveys during the 2014 Crimea crisis, real behavioral measures — and it always points the same way: being affected by a threat changes what kind of leadership we look for, not just which policies we support. The underlying evolutionary explanation — that in violent ancestral environments a big, strong ally was literally useful for winning fights, and that calculation got baked into how we evaluate leaders today — is reasonable, but it’s worth flagging for what it is: a functional hypothesis about the distant past, not a directly verified fact.
On another note, in 2004, a group of Americans were asked to write two paragraphs about their own death, while another group wrote about other topics, and afterward both rated George W. Bush as a leader. Those who had written about their own death gave him a clearly higher score [7]. This is the study that popularized the whole idea, and the one that still shows up in ninety percent of popular articles about fear and politics. Here’s the catch: that particular study doesn’t hold up well today. In 2019, a team of 37 researchers across 21 different labs, with more than 2,200 participants and the involvement of the original authors themselves, tried to replicate the finding following the procedure to the letter, and the aggregate effect was indistinguishable from zero [8]. In 2023, another team published five independent studies using the same classic paradigm, and all five failed to find the pattern [9]. A 2025 systematic review of more than eight hundred studies of this hypothesis concluded that much of the original enthusiasm is explained by publication bias: studies that found the effect got published, studies that didn’t stayed in a drawer [10]. But notice something important here: this is a problem with the 2004 lab paradigm, not with the broader conclusion. The broader conclusion — real threat, harder politics — never depended on that experiment. It rests on Israel’s rockets, on Stenner’s theory, on Laustsen and Petersen’s dominant faces. I’m including this study to point out that some research on fear’s influence over voters isn’t conclusive — but there’s more than enough proof regardless.
That said, fear also doesn’t automatically guarantee that people rally behind whoever’s in charge, and the pandemic proved that without meaning to. During covid-19 there was what’s called a rally effect — the impulse to close ranks behind leadership when there’s a shared threat — but that effect wasn’t automatic or universal. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, who publicly downplayed the severity of the virus, didn’t see the popularity boost that leaders who acknowledged the threat as real and acted on it did see [11]. In other words: fear needs someone at the top to validate that the fear is justified. Without that validation, fear can turn directly against whoever ignores it, instead of working in their favor. In my view, this is another example of fear acting as a vote multiplier — in this case, by trying to minimize economic damage and downplaying the threat, they failed to earn the electorate’s trust.
That said, it isn’t clear that fear benefits one particular side more than another. A 2003 meta-analysis with 88 samples and more than 22,000 people across twelve countries found that death anxiety correlated with conservatism at 0.50, and the need for order and cognitive closure at 0.26 [12]. That same year, other psychologists — among them one of the founding figures of terror management theory — published a critical reply pointing out that cognitive rigidity and intolerance also show up on the left when it’s their own values that feel threatened, and accused the original study of looking at only one side of the spectrum [13]. That debate is still open twenty years later.
Now, if the activation of Stenner’s authoritarian predisposition depends on feeling that the normative order is broken, and social media algorithms are optimized to reward content that generates outrage and alarm, do we currently have a technology capable of keeping a portion of the electorate in a state of permanent normative threat, without needing a real attack or war behind it? This is just a conjecture, but we know that normative threat activates the authoritarian predisposition [5], and we know that media and social platforms prioritize content that generates intense emotional reactions to drive engagement. It’s logical, in my view, to put two and two together and conclude that this cocktail is likely one of the drivers of the political polarization we’re currently living through.
The conclusion is that fear functions as a political technology, backed by decades of convergent evidence from very different methodologies.
References
[1] Getmansky, A., & Zeitzoff, T. (2014). Terrorism and voting: The effect of rocket threat on voting in Israeli elections. American Political Science Review, 108(3), 588–604. — Reliable (natural experiment).
[2] Berrebi, C., & Klor, E. F. (2008). Are voters sensitive to terrorism? Direct evidence from the Israeli electorate. American Political Science Review, 102(3), 279–301. — Reliable.
[3] Balcells, L., & Torrats-Espinosa, G. (2018). Using a natural experiment to estimate the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks. PNAS, 115(42), 10624–10629. — Reliable.
[4] Maher, P. J., Roth, J., Griffin, S., Foran, A. M., Jay, S., McHugh, C., Ryan, M., Bradshaw, D., Quayle, M., & Muldoon, O. T. (2022). Pandemic threat and group cohesion: national identification in the wake of COVID-19 is associated with authoritarianism. The Journal of Social Psychology, 163(6), 789–805. — Reliable.
[5] Stenner, K. (2005). The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge University Press. — Reliable.
[6] Laustsen, L., & Petersen, M. B. (2017). Perceived conflict and leader dominance: Individual and contextual factors behind preferences for dominant leaders. Political Psychology, 38(6), 1083–1101. — Reliable.
[7] Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Rothschild, Z., Sullivan, D., Arndt, J., Vail, K., Pyszczynski, T. (2004). Deliver us from evil: The effects of mortality salience and reminders of 9/11 on support for President George W. Bush. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(9), 1136–1150. — Problematic (finding not replicated in later multi-lab studies; see [8][9][10]).
[8] Klein, R. A. et al. (Many Labs 4) (2019/2022). Many Labs 4: Failure to Replicate Mortality Salience Effect With and Without Original Author Involvement. — Reliable (preregistered multi-lab replication, 21 labs, N=2,220).
[9] Treger, S., Benau, E. M., Timko, C. A., & Arnout, B. I. A. (2023). Not so terrifying after all? A set of failed replications of the mortality salience effects of Terror Management Theory. PLOS ONE, 18(5). — Reliable.
[10] Chen, L., Benjamin, R., Guo, Y., Lai, A., & Heine, S. J. (2025). Managing the terror of publication bias: A systematic review of the mortality salience hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. — Reliable.
[11] Lytkina, E., & Reeskens, T. (2025). Rally around the government or a populist response? How concerns about COVID-19 and emotional responses relate to institutional trust and support for right-wing populism. American Behavioral Scientist. — Reliable.
[12] Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375. — With reservations (correlational meta-analysis; active debate, see [13]).
[13] Greenberg, J., & Jonas, E. (2003). Psychological motives and political orientation: The left, the right, and the rigid. Comment on Jost et al. (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 376–382. — With reservations (critical reply, reflects an unresolved academic debate).
Note on flagged sources: [7] is included because it remains the field’s historical reference study, but the text is explicit that its specific finding doesn’t hold up and that the post’s conclusion doesn’t depend on it. [12] and [13] reflect a legitimate, unresolved academic disagreement specifically about the relationship between threat/uncertainty and conservatism; it’s the one point in the post where the evidence doesn’t converge, and it’s presented as such.