Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Prior work has linked societal threat to the emergence of more conservative and authoritarian attitudes within representative democracies. We conducted three experimental studies (total N=1021) to investigate whether hypothetical threat situations also impact peoples’ attitudes towards democracy itself, and towards alternative systems. Study 1 (Belgium-Flanders) shows that individuals – when confronted with various threats – devaluate representative and participatory government types and show relatively stronger endorsement of less democratic alternatives (i.e., technocracy and autocracy). Study 2 (UK) clarifies that extranational threats elicit a greater shift towards non-democratic “solutions” than intranational threats. Furthermore, Study 2 also demonstrated that citizens generally find a “just process” less important in times of crisis. Finally, Study 3 (UK) replicates these findings, and additionally shows that the effect of threat on support for technocracy in particular, can be explained by heightened anticipated anxiety. Yet, our findings do not indicate that anticipated emotions consistently or reliably account for the observed shifts in government preferences in the context of threat.