The Communication of Fear: Leadership and Public Discourse in a Social Media Age

• In Event: Visuals and Technology in 20/20

Abstract

Many Americans perceive fear to be a growing force in contemporary politics. Studies of political communication have long identified the importance of emotional appeals in the messaging strategies of political elites (e.g., Marcus, 2002; Brader, 2006; Jones et al., 2013). Indeed, a considerable body of research shows the importance of feelings and emotions to political behavior, relative to facts and evidence (e.g., Zajonc, 1984; Damasio, 1995; LeDoux, 1996; Gorman and Gorman, 2017). While many studies have examined the tone of elites’ political communication, identifying patterns in positivity and negativity (e.g., Arceneaux and Nickerson, 2010; Soroka, 2014; Pozzi et al., 2017), research on affective strategies that emphasize specific emotions (e.g., fear, anger, pride, hope, nostalgia, etc.) is much more limited.

Stoking fear can be particularly consequential for a democracy. Fear can drive some groups to political action while simultaneously inhibiting others. Fear can induce seemingly irrational and often destructive behavior. Fear can drive the growth of illiberal political forces and weaken public support for the protections and rights that are essential to a well-functioning democratic society. In the age-old question of balancing liberty and security, justified fears sometimes present evidence in favor of security, but fears do not have to be justified to be sold. Nevertheless, the consequences of fear are real, even if boogeymen are not.

This paper therefore attempts to better understand political elites’ emotional appeals made through fear, intentionally or not. Who uses the politics of fear? Do different actors use fear in fundamentally different ways? Do Republicans use fear more than Democrats, as some literature would suggest (e.g., Onraet et al., 2013; Burke et al., 2013; Jost et al., 2017)? Do frontrunners use fear less than those struggling in the polls? When and where do political elites communicate messages of fear? What is subject to the politics of fear—what topics and conversations are most dominated by fear?

To help answer these questions, this paper examines variation in the use of fear in the statements of major United States presidential candidates in recent election cycles. As contestants for party leadership and the highest office in the land, these few political actors carry significant sway over the character of American politics as a whole; the words they choose are of particular importance. Candidates’ statements are examined within two prominent campaign media: tweets from candidates’ Twitter accounts, and statements during televised primary and general election debates. Both media consist of highly intentional, prepared, and generally polished speech aimed at broad audiences, reflecting what these actors most desire to communicate to the American polity. How much do they wish to communicate messages of fear?

Automated content analysis techniques permit a systemic look at these tens of thousands of candidate statements across both media. Several common dictionary-based sentiment lexicons are used to identify the prevalence of fear in this broad corpus of candidate statements. The most fear-dominated statements are then selected for a more limited corpus, on which topic modeling is conducted. A battery of frequency analysis techniques are also used to identify patterns in both the broad and limited corpus. Finally, data from these automated content analyses are regressed against relevant contextual variables, including political party of the speaker, ideological extremity, polling performance, primary election performance, salience of key events (announcing a campaign, spin after a debate, etc.), the medium of communication, and trends in the speech of competitors.

The findings suggest that political elites do, in fact, use the politics of fear in fundamentally different ways. There is some variation between political parties; there is even more variation between candidates within each political party. Presidential candidates use fear to differing degrees overall, and tend to use fear to discuss some topics but not others; exactly which topics varies from candidate to candidate. Some topics are the subject of fear-driven emotional appeals on both sides of the debate, but in different ways that target very different fears in the electorate. Overall, the findings from this paper suggest that the use of fear by political elites is a choice to a meaningful degree, given the considerable variation in its use from candidate to candidate.

Authors

• Andrew R.L. Trexler, Duke University

• Kenneth S. Rogerson, Duke University