The availability heuristic is a very powerful cognitive bias that influences the perception of political threats. It leads individuals to overestimate the probability of events by reflecting on how easily they can remember similar occurrences. Political leaders, when they manipulate this psychological process with messages intended to instill fear, can have an immense impact on public opinion, generally at the expense of good decision making. Fear has proven to be an extremely useful tool throughout history in politics. Powerful narratives have been utilized by states to further policies that would otherwise be unpalatable, ranging from the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War to the mass surveillance agendas justified by the “War on Terror”. The availability heuristic presumes that events that receive extensive publicity, for example, terrorist attacks, violence, or financial crises, have a disproportionate impact on the fears of voters, even in circumstances where empirical evidence indicates that such dangers are much rarer than they seem to be.
Kahneman and Tversky (1973) detailed how people utilize mental shortcuts in evaluating threats. As media exposed the public to exaggerated scenes of crime or terror, the emergent perception of threat was out of proportion to reality. Within contemporary electoral politics, fear is a potent tool. Politicians routinely characterize their adversaries as existential threats, highlight uncommon yet alarming criminal events, and advocate for extreme policy changes under the guise of safeguarding the population.
Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is a textbook case of fear-based campaign politics. At several rallies, he repeatedly claimed that the election of Vice President Kamala Harris would be an economic catastrophe, increase crime rates, and perhaps lead to World War III. His words painted a picture of a country teetering on the brink of anarchy, overrun by illegal immigrants, though there was no supporting evidence. To propagate this view, digitally altered campaign images presented a critical future of the United States. By repeatedly sharing these images and stories with his followers, Trump effectively turned fear into the prevailing lens through which they viewed the election. Work conducted by Valentino, Hutchings, and White (2002) indicates that emotional appeals, especially those involving subtle racial cues, can be an effective way to rally voters, particularly those most vulnerable to such tactics.
However, this does not happen only in the United States. Fear-based rhetoric appears globally and across different themes. In the realm of crime and public safety, former president Jair Bolsonaro consistently used violent crime as a pretext for more aggressive policies in Brazil, relying on concentrated media coverage. His rhetoric spotlighted isolated crime incidents to justify militarized operations in favelas and a harsher stance on criminal groups, consolidating support among conservative sectors. Similarly, Rodrigo Duterte’s hardline approach to drug crimes in the Philippines framed drug addiction as a significant cause of public threat, offering a justification for extensive extrajudicial killings.
Another major theme involves immigration and national identity. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, in 2018, with his anti-immigration campaign labelled “Stop Soros,” framed the entrepreneur as a secret mastermind of mass migration, demanding the passage of tighter policies. Orbán claimed that NGOs funded by Soros were facilitating illegal immigration, and passed laws to criminalize these activities, introducing high taxes on foreign funding. This campaign included widespread propaganda and posters, reinforcing a sense of imminent threat to national security. Modi’s administration in India similarly utilized concerns about illegal immigration to rush through the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, prompting national protests. The law favored specific religious groups while excluding Muslims, and was framed as a national security measure, despite its discriminatory implications. In France, Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign has consistently centered on particular instances of migrants as a justification for promoting blanket anti-immigration policies, thus exaggerating issues of national security and cultural identity.
Fear appeals are also strongly present in the context of national security and terrorism. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cited national security concerns, terrorism, and coup plots as an excuse for restricting media freedom and political dissent. After the failed 2016 coup, thousands were arrested under vague accusations and numerous independent outlets were shut down.
These actions exploit fear as a unifying political force, with effects that persist well beyond election cycles. The use of the availability heuristic by political leaders to authorize emergency measures inevitably leads to democratic values being undermined. In fact, the more aware the public is of potential dangers to national security, the more likely they are to support authoritarian policies. Altheide (2002), in his analysis of post-9/11 fear discourse, shows how a heightened public perception of fear created an increase in popularity of measures such as those enacted after the attack to the World Trade Centre, including the USA Patriot Act, despite worries about civil liberties.
Governments that use fear to justify abusive actions have a tendency to disregard democratic conventions and establish dangerous precedents. Political fear appeals habitually depend on the availability heuristic, leading individuals to believe in a distorted reality by making exceptional events seem typical. This evokes emotional responses and undermines logical reasoning. To counter this, one would want to promote media literacy and critical thinking from an early stage in education so people can learn how to recognize their own biases and avoid being deceived. The free media must play a role in exposing misleading information, and individuals must be encouraged to check and use more than one source. While Nyhan and Reifler (2010) found that corrective information often fails, and can even backfire, under certain conditions, it can be effective when political identity is less salient. This underscores the need for a well-informed public and media practices that promote factual clarity to safeguard democracy from the corrosive effects of fear-based politics.
References:
Altheide, D.L. (2002). Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203794494
Gold, M. (2024). Trump’s consistent message online and onstage: Be afraid. The New York Times, 1 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/us/politics/trump-fear-speeches.html
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), pp.207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9
Nyhan, B. and Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), pp.303–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2
Valentino, N.A., Hutchings, V.L. and White, I.K. (2002). Cues that matter: How political ads prime racial attitudes during campaigns. American Political Science Review, 96(1), pp.75–90. https://polisci.osu.edu/sites/default/files/Valentino,%20Hutchings,%20White.pdf
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