Fear as a Continuum: Using Terror and Horror to Understand Protest Decisions

• In Event: 'Invisible' Protest-Repression? Exploring Hard-to-Measure Interactions/Outcomes

Abstract

Studies of Political Violence have long taken fear as a singular emotion and often conflates its temporal forms, horror and terror, within theorizations of terrorism, collective memory, and repression-dissent amongst other phenomena. Drawing from political violence, cognitive psychology and gothic literature, this paper first presents a theory differentiating the two sub-emotions of fear, where terror is the feeling of dread and anticipation that precedes a frightening experience and horror as a feeling that follows a frightening experience. It then outlines an experimental strategy to differentiate horror and terror, and argues that such distinction has analytical utility in addressing a key observational problem in studying the repression-dissent relationship.
Namely, observations of ‘no dissent’ within a given population can potentially conflate four phenomena: 1) citizens being satisfied with the status quo, 2) citizens self-censoring in anticipation of responsive repression, 3) citizens already being preventively repressed and 4) citizens being dissatisfied with the status quo but not dissenting. Through operationalizing the temporal variations of fear to indicate two temporal forms of repression (anticipated responsive repression via terror and preventive repression via horror), this paper proposes individuals that are deterred by perceived preventive repression and anticipations of responsive repression can be broadly differentiated. It lastly discusses how such differentiation may be useful in other spheres of political studies.

Author

• Agnes Yu, London School of Economics