Political Communication

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The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals in Political

Communication

Simon SchellerSIMON SCHELLERhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4732-3352

To cite this article: Simon SchellerSIMON SCHELLERhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4732-3352

(2019): The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals in Political Communication, Political Communication,
DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2019.1631918

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Political Communication, 0:1–23, 2019
Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1631918

The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals in Political

Communication

SIMON SCHELLER

Fear appeals constitute a frequent theme of populist rhetoric. One potential motive for
this is that they decrease people’s reliance on partisan habits and increase openness to
new information. Political actors can use this effect to attract more ideologically
distant groups of voters, but not without drawbacks.
This paper analyses the strategic use of fear appeals in the framework of the
Bounded-Confidence model. It is shown that attracting undecided voters between
two opinion clusters is decisive for the success of a party’s fear appeal strategy.
Hence, fear appeals can increase a party’s reach for new supporters, yet only if the
party manages to clearly differentiate itself form ideological competitors.

Keywords fear appeals, affective intelligence theory, strategic communication,

bounded confidence, agent-based modelling

Introduction
Populist rhetoric experiences a recent upsurge in a variety of western liberal democracies.
But not only has populism become more prominent, it has also become more successful –
a development of which Donald Trump and the Brexit-campaign constitute the most
prominent examples. As a core part of their communicative strategies, populists and
extremists frequently appeal to people’s fears (Chevigny, 2003; Cincu, 2017; Heinisch,
2003; Pfau, 2007; Wodak, 2015).
Why is fear such a popular theme among extremist political actors? Psychological
research suggests that fear cues in political messages decrease people’s reliance on
partisan habits and increase people’s openness to new information (Brader, 2006;
Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000). Thus, using fear appeals potentially enables
smaller and extremist parties to break people’s political routines and attract them towards
their own (extreme) positions. Yet, the opposite effect may occur when an extreme party’s
core voters are drawn towards other groups in turn. This paper sets out to analyse the
opinion dynamics of these processes, and – given this trade-off – how political actors can
employ fear appeals successfully.
Simon Scheller studied philosophy, economics and political science in Bayreuth, Leeds and
Bamberg. He holds a PhD in political science from Bamberg University and is currently a
postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
Address correspondence to Simon Scheller, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy
(MCMP), Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 München, Germany. E-mail: simon.scheller@lmu.de
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.
tandfonline.com/upcp.

1
2 Simon Scheller

Gaining a deeper understanding into the strategic dimension of emotional appeals

in political communication constitutes a crucial prerequisite for safeguarding demo-
cratic institutions against populist and extremist interference. The issue’s recent topi-
cality not only raises concerns about potential harms to democratic legitimacy, but also
about the feasibility and legitimacy of potential countermeasures. In order to evaluate
these concerns appropriately, the strategic imperatives and consequences of using fear
appeals must be comprehensively understood.
In order to contribute to such an understanding, this paper presents a formal,
agent-based model of opinion dynamics that accounts for people’s affective informa-
tion processing: Assuming a simple one-dimensional opinion space, people consider
only those other individuals that hold a similar opinion than their own, and disregard
too distant others when updating their opinion. In analogy to Hegselmann and Krause
(2002), the required similarity is expressed by people’s confidence bound
, which
measures the relevant cutoff-distance. When subjected to fear appeals from political
parties, people’s confidence bounds widen, inducing them to consider more distant
opinions.
Analysing the model suggests that extreme parties can potentially increase support
by appealing to fear, but only under risky conditions: While fear creates a larger basin of
attraction for more distant voters, former core voters can also be attracted by others.
A party, therefore, needs to consider its positioning strategy in turn: Either, it clearly
distances itself from potential competitors, or it takes a very similar position. Notably,
this provides a micro-level causal explanation for a strategy of “political product differ-
entiation”, which is frequently attributed to extreme parties in Europe (see e.g. Kitschelt
& McGann, 1997).
The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 reports individual level findings regarding
the impact of fear on information processing in political communication. Section 3
describes how these factors are captured in a formal, agent-based model. In order to
study the aggregate dynamics of fear appeals, section 4 presents the results of the model
analysis. The final section contextualises these results, evaluates their scope and rele-
vance, and proposes avenues for further theoretical and empirical inquiry.

Theory
“Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border”
(Trump, 2015). “We are being submerged by a flood of immigrants that are sweeping
all before them” (Joseph, 2017, citing Marine Le Pen). “No one can feel safe any more in
public spaces, nowhere” (Weidel, 2018, my translation).
As these three exemplary statements illustrate, populist actors try to enduce fear among
the population, particularly regarding the issue of migration. Assuming that extremist
populist political actors aim to maximise their vote share in elections (Downs, 1957), this
paper enquires under what conditions this strategy makes sense.
Central to the argument of this paper, anxiety1 increases people’s openness for
new information and triggers them to abandon partisan habits. Given that people’s
political predispositions and party affiliations are rather strong under normal circum-
stances, attracting people’s attention constitutes a crucial challenge for populist actors
at the extreme ends of the opinion spectrum.
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 3

Emotions and Information Processing

Under regular circumstances, people exhibit strong party affiliations, and often merely
reinforce their already held opinions (Campbell, 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet,
1948; MacKuen, Marcus, Neuman, & Keele, 2007). Accordingly, partisanship constitutes
an important decision heuristic for voters, as it provides easily understandable cues for
cognitively complex voting decisions (Kam, 2005). As a result, plain and reasoned
arguments are unlikely to sway voters’ opinions under regular circumstances.
However, Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) posits that people’s decision making is
strongly influenced by their affective responses. In particular, fear impacts people’s
information processing habits: “Citizens who feel calm about presidential candidates
are more likely to act on partisan habits, but those who feel anxious are more likely to
attend to new information, defect from partisanship, and vote on the basis of issue and
trait assessments” (Marcus et al., 2000, p. 111).
These findings trace back to anxiety’s evolutionary purpose of detecting threats in one’s
environment, breaking the individual out of her routine behaviour, and inducing an immedi-
ate focus of all cognitive resources on the imminent threat (Marcus et al., 2000, p. 28f and
p. 53ff); (Brader, 2006, p. 56). This evolutionary model translates into the realm of political
information processing: Anxiety about the political situation leads people to abandon their
regular party affiliations, engages them to seek out new information and to rationally
reconsider their current opinion or position (Marcus et al., 2000, p. 65ff).
More generally, fear induces a shift from a heuristic- or habit-based mode of decision
making towards decision making based on contemporary evaluations. This is very much in
line with dual-process models of human decision making (Chaiken & Trope, 1999;
Kahneman & Egan, 2011; MacKuen et al., 2007; Marcus, 1988; Marcus & MacKuen,
1993; Mukherjee, 2010; Sherman, Krieglmeyer, & Calanchini, 2014), which argue that
humans are equipped with two distinct decision making systems with different operating
principles: One with active cognitive control, the other a sub-conscious heuristic process. The
evolutionary purpose of fear is to enduce shifts between these two systems when necessary.
Cognitive Appraisal Theory (CAT), concordantly with AIT, suggests that appraisal
systems have evolved for appropriate and effective coping with events (Ellsworth &
Smith, 1988; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Further, proponents of CAT posit that not
a certain stimulus itself, but rather a person’s appraisal thereof causes a potential emo-
tional response (Roseman & Smith, 2001, p. 6).
For an event to evoke fear, an individual must evaluate a situation as uncertain in its
outcome, as well as relevant for and inconsistent with one’s motives or goals (Roseman,
1984). Given these appraisals, an individual experiences fear, preparing its organism to
look for ways out of the situation. Like AIT, CAT underscores the heuristic and functional
value of emotions (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988, p. 300), and analogously predicts fear to
manifest in politics in the way described above.
Plenty of empirical evidence for the described effect of fear in politics exists in the
literature. Empirical studies on issues such as NAFTA or the Gulf war showed that voters
who were anxious about the political situation were more likely to abandon their partisan-
ship and instead support the candidate that matched their individual preferences on the
issue more closely (Marcus et al., 2000, p. 96ff). Marcus and MacKuen (1993) show
similar effects of anxiety with regards to US presidential elections of the 1980’s.
Experimental evidence by Brader (2006) corroborates these findings: Emotionally
laden political advertisments were shown to change people’s political attitudes in the way
predicted by AIT. Initially opposed or indifferent individuals were more likely to evaluate
4 Simon Scheller

a candidate more positively and to actually vote for the candidate when his or her ad was
presented in a fear evoking way (Brader, 2006, p. 115). Elsewhere, anxiety has also been
found to increase information searching behaviour qualitatively as well as quantitatively
(Brader, Valentino, & Suhay, 2008).2
Importantly, this latter stream of research also shows that specifically taylored messages
can be used to deliberately evoke particular emotions in their targets, inducing the described
effect of increasing people’s openness for new information. The influencability of emotions
through communication has also been shown in other contexts and with other tools, for
instance regarding the transmission of emotional cues through facial expressions (Masters &
Sullivan, 1989b, 1989a; Warnecke, Masters, & Kempter, 1992). Kühne, Schemer, Matthes,
and Wirth (2011) find that emotionally laden news segments influence the emotions elicited
from viewers and influences people’s political choices and opinion formation in the context
of concrete policy decisions. Gross (2008) report that emotionalized framing influenced
people’s attitudes towards minimum sentencing regulations.3

A Strategic Perspective
In light of these findings, the question arises as to how emotional appeals can be
employed for political purposes on a larger scale. Jerit (2004) suggests that emotional
appeals generally are frequently employed in order to mobilize voters. Schnur (2007)
argues that one major determinant of choice of emotional strategy is whether a candidate
wants to sustain her position in the race, or upset the status quo. For example, a candidate
who is lagging behind in a race has an incentive to appeal to a broader audience in order
to gain the majority’s support. Such reasoning would suggest fear-evoking messages as
the appropriate choice in winner-take-all elections. A leading candidate, in contrast, has
an incentive to reinforce and strengthen current levels of support by appealing to
enthusiasm and calming people’s fears (Ridout & Searles, 2011).
Brader (2006) finds supporting evidence for these claims: “Consistent with expecta-
tions, political challengers are more likely to produce fear appeals than incumbents, and
front-runners are more likely to produce enthusiasm appeals” (Brader, 2006, p. 15f).
When looking at election races over time, fear appeals by a trailing candidate are more
likely to occur towards the end of a race in order to break partisan habits so as to
encourage last-minute political learning (Ridout & Searles, 2011, p. 445).
Beyond these contributions, the relation between individual-level psychological
findings and possibilities for political actors to influence larger groups of voters remains
largely undertheorized in the literature. Usually, scholars study individual behaviour or
aggregate data (or both), but they seldom formulate explicitly how the two levels may be
causally connected. A central contribution of this paper is to provide an explicit theory of
how micro-level mechanisms (anxiety inducing a switch in information-processing mode)
and macro-level outcomes (different levels of party support) might be causally linked.
Such theorising is especially important for multiparty political systems, where total
vote shares – as opposed to binary candidate choices – are at issue. Due to the focus on
US elections of many studies, impacts in systems with proportional representation (as
they are common in many European countries) are studied much less frequently. In a PR
system, a candidate or party with low or moderate support might decide to follow
a strategy of launching fear appeals to potentially widen its scope of influence. Yet,
such a party also runs the risk of diminishing its folllowership even further – after all, fear
appeals should make individuals also more open for arguments from the other side.
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 5

Thus, while the previously described results are well researched on the micro-level,
obvious limitations exist for assessing the aggregate impact on the opinion formation
process of large groups. The model presented subsequently aspires to overcome this
lacuna and provides a theoretical framework for studying strategies for influencing mass
groups of voters by means of fear appeals, while accounting for the individual-level
psychological effects this section has outlined.

Model

The Bounded Confidence Framework

While the previously described findings provide plenty of insights about how isolated
individuals react to emotionalised political stimuli, political communities are centrally
characterised by recurring interaction between individuals and intricate feedback loops
that emerge through mutual and simultaneous influences. Thus, in order to theorize the
aggregate effects of fear appeals in political communities, one must take a systems
perspective and take these dynamic interaction processes into account.
For such questions in general, agent-based modeling (ABM) has been proposed as
a useful methodology because it allows us to explicate causal connections between the
micro- and the macro-level (Smith & Conrey, 2007). ABMs describe individual agents
and the rules according to which they interact with each other and the environment. From
those micro-conditions, computer simulations are used to assess outcomes on the aggre-
gate level. For analysing group political psychology, ABM can be seen as a rather unique
and novel technique.
In this particular context of public opinion formation, the Bounded Confidence (BC)
model by Hegselmann and Krause (2002) provides a well suited environment to capture
relevant dynamic aspects, while allowing us to incorporate individual’s affect-driven
information processing as described in section 2. This section characterises the model’s
basic functioning and how it incorporates fear appeals.
In the BC-model, each individual agent holds an opinion on a simple left-right
spectrum that ranges from 0 to 1. Agents update their opinions by averaging over the
opinions of other agents. The name-giving confidence bound thereby determines which
other agents an agent considers for updating: Agent i with confidence bound
i considers
those agents within their confidence bound, all agents farther away than
i are disre-
garded. Agents simultaneously update opinions round by round until a stable constella-
tion of opinions is reached.
Figure 1 depicts an examplary run of the BC model. The y-axis depicts the 0 to 1
opinion spectrum; the x-axis shows the stepwise opinion updating, starting with an
equidistant inititial distribution of opinions.4
The BC-model encompasses a variety of appealing characteristics in light of this
paper’s purpose:
● As is most apt for a political context, opinions are displayed on a continuous one-
dimensional spectrum. This way of formalizing opinions is therefore sufficiently
rich to include key factors, such as comparability of ideological distances between
individuals, while still being maximally simplistic.
● Opinion formation is described as a social process among peers. The model can be
easily extended to capture communication under the influence of political actors, as
described in Hegselmann and Krause (2015) and below. While certainly other
6 Simon Scheller

Figure 1. Exemplary BC model run with
i ¼ 0:1 .

influencing factors exist, peers and political actors constitute the central influences
on an agent’s opinion.
● As the discussion in the previous section illustrates, selective attention to and
selective acceptance of certain opinions or individuals constitute key features of
political communication. The variable
embodies exactly this mechanism in the
simplest possible fashion: When updating opinions, agents listen to only those
others they have a close enough affiliation with.
● Finally, the BC model is able to replicate and explain fragmentation, polarization5
and consensus formation in public opinion (Hegselmann & Krause, 2002). These
processes are crucial in explaining how party support comes about. As they are
endogeneous to the model, it is possible to discuss and explain strategic aspects in
direct connection with these phenomena.
As a result, the model provides a suitable structure to consider the role of emotional
appeals in political communication. It allows us to incorporate core features of real world
opinion dynamics in such a way that they resonate well with empirical findings, while at
the same time not overcomplicating the model. This is in line with Smith and Conrey
(2007, p. 98), who argue that agent-based implementations of findings from social
psychology must strike an appropriate balance between descriptive detail and an obfus-
cating overload.

Affective Opinion Formation in the BC-Model

As outlined in section 2, an agent’s emotional state plays a central role in determining
how she deals with incoming information. More specifically, individuals are more or less
open to other people’s views, depending on their associated emotional state when
receiving a message.
The parameter
directly incorporates this openness to outside sources: The larger an
agent’s confidence bound
, the more open she is for listening to other agents. At the
same time, when partisanship is interpreted as (or approximated by) positional proximity,
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 7

a larger
implies weaker partisan commitments. One could also see this as a more
rational and more evidence-based mode of decision making, as more informational
sources are considered. Thus, in accordance with the previously discussed findings, an
anxious agent would be ascribed a comparatively larger
. This relationship, in a nutshell,
is how the empirical findings from section 2 are incorporated in the formal model.
This interpretation constitutes the central connection between theory and formal
model. Justifying this modeling choice is thus crucial for the model’s credibility and
applicability. In particular, the model simplifies in three different ways:
First, emotions and a person’s emotional state are richer than what can reasonably be
captured by
. Emotional appraisals have a variety of other effects aside from influencing
political perceptions. Yet, the purpose of this paper is not to model emotions and human
cognition in its fullest detail, but to narrow the focus of attention on the impact of
affective states on information processing.
Second, emotions are not the only potential factor of influence on
. To mention only
a few others, political sophistication, personality traits or the situational context also play
their part in information processing. Yet, the model’s purpose is not an all-encompassing
descriptive account of human information processing, but to address only the limited area
of how emotions can be used to affect opinion formation. Other factors can be considered
random noise as long as they are not systematically linked to emotional states and
information processing.
Third, this paper limits itself to studying fear’s impact only, neglecting influences of
other emotions on information processing. Individuals may experience multiple emotions
simultaneously, and CAT further suggests that different appraisals, and hence emotions, are
frequently in contention with each other. Anger, in particular, exhibits similar appraisal
dimensions as fear, yet at the same time has the opposite effect on information processing,
namely to narrow an individual’s perceptual focus and enforce habituated decision making
(Parker & Isbell, 2010; Vasilopoulos, Marcus, Valentino, & Foucault, 2018b).
To address this concern, it is important to acknowledge that especially the competing
appraisals of anxiety and anger pose a significant difficulty for political actors in practice.
While this paper will suggest criteria for when fear (and not anger) should be evoked
from a strategic point of view, evoking the one without the other may turn out to be very
difficult to achieve in practice. Without doubt, this constitutes a limitation for the
applicability of the produced results: When anxiety and anger co-occur, they can be
expected to work in opposite directions and, as a result, the net effect on information
processing will be weaker.
All the more, this underscores the importance for political actors to try to distinguish
appeals to fear from appeals to anger. While recommendations concerning rhetorical
strategies for this purpose lie well beyond this paper’s scope, the following considerations
can nonetheless be exptected to be crucial: While anger is associated with an appraisal of
certainty, and hence a perceived control over the situation, the opposite is true for anxiety.
An individual experiences anxiety when she perceives uncertainty about the situation and
when she experiences little or no control over it (Rico, Guinjoan, & Anduiza, 2017, p. 6f).
Thus, perceived (un-)certainty should be a central concern for political actors when they
are aiming to induce anxiety or anger without also accidentially inducing the other.
Section 5 will pick up this issue and address how these considerations impact the results
from the subsequent analysis.6
Prospectively, studying appeals to anger with the present model is both feasible
and potentially fruitful. Towards ideologically proximate individuals, anger could be
8 Simon Scheller

used as a strategic tool in itself, for example to make people stick to one’s group
affiliation and not to look anywhere beyond. Such a strategy may stand in opposition
to appeals to fear, and would aim to make a party’s core followers immune to outside
influences. More flexible and dynamic strategies could be considered in more sophis-
ticated models, for instance when political parties are able to address their core
supporters with different messages than more ideologically distant individuals. In
such a case, it can be speculated that anger should be evoked among the former
group, and anxiety among the latter.7 Such models might also explain empirical
patterns as the one observed in Vasilopoulos et al. (2018b), to which I will also
come back in section 5. With some effort, these features could be implemented in the
subsequently presented model. For reasons of space, however, such an analysis must
be postponed to a follow-up paper.

Modeling Political Actors

On the basis of this core relationship between
and its empirical underpinnings, let us
now turn to the formalization of political actors and how they cast emotional appeals.
Conveniently, Hegselmann and Krause (2015) already describe something very similar in
the BC-framework when talking about charismatic leaders.
Political parties have an opinion on the one-dimensional opinion space just like
regular agents, and they influence the opinions of regular citizens just like regular
agents influence each other. However, parties themselves do not change their position
at all.
In practice, parties may be more influential than average citizens for various reasons.
They may explicitly be considered direct sources of political information, they might be
regarded as experts on political questions or, in the case of parties, they may speak for
large and influential groups or institutions. To incorporate this, a party’s strength is
assumed to be 10 times as large as that of one individual citizen.8 As with other regular
agents, if the party’s opinion position is within an agent’s
i , the agent considers the party
opinion for updating, else not.9
While other studies focus on strategic party positioning (Downs, 1957; Hegselmann,
König, Kurz, Niemann, & Rambau, 2015; Laver & Sergenti, 2011) as a feasible long-run
strategy, this study considers much shorter time frames (say an election campaign), where
parties must provide potential supporters with a consistent world view so as not to be
regarded as opportunistic or fickle. Thus, a party’s position is assumed to be fixed over
the course of a model run, which is suitable for the context of emotional appeals.
Furthermore, note that even though the party’s strength itself is fixed throughout the
model analysis, a party’s effective influence can still change endogeneously, namely
when a party manages to attract a large number of followers to its position. These
individuals influence others in addition to the party’s genuine influence.
Figure 2 depicts the same exemplary model run as Figure 1, but now also including
a party with the very extreme opinion 0:01, represented through the dotted line at the very
bottom. The gray area surrounding the party represents the party’s direct sphere of
influence. In comparison to the opinion dynamics without the party, the party’s influence
changes the final distribution of opinions: now, 15 individuals end up at the party’s
extreme position.
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 9

Figure 2. Exemplary BC run with
i ¼ 0:1 and a party with position Φ ¼ 0:01 .

Modeling Emotional Appeals

In a final step, let us introduce emotional appeals by political actors to the model. Since
emotional states are captured in the agent’s confidence bound
i , an emotionl appeal must
influence a voter’s
i . On a technical level, influence on
works the same way as regular
influence on opinions: An agent averages over all
-values of agents and parties within
her confidence neigborhood. However, the interpretations strongly diverge between
regular voters and political actors:
When regular agents influence the
i of their peers and vice versa, this amounts to
emotional cues being transmitted in voter-to-voter communication. Empirical justifica-
tions for this are manifold. One can see this as a matter of emotional contagion that
happens via facial recognitions (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993), via adopting and
reiteration of political frames and language, or through explicit references to emotional
cues towards certain issues.
In contrast, when a party influences a voter’s
i , this is interpreted as a deliberate
emotional appeal by the party. Label a party’s emotional appeal
. Following the
theoretical arguments above, large values of
represent strong fear appeals. All agents
who have the party within their ε-range are subjected to its fear appeal. As a result, their
i
becomes larger. The influenced agents experience fear and, according to the presented
theory, become more open to more distant opinions and less driven by partisan habits.
Smaller values of
, in contrast, imply weak or no fear appeals.10
Like with opinions, a party influences agents’ confidence bounds, but not vice versa.
Also, this influence is once again limited to those for which the party lies within their
confidence bound. While parties may try to appeal to everyone’s emotions, Albertson and
Gadarian (2015) show that partisanship also moderates the extent to which different
sources can evoke emotional responses.11
Fear appeals can carry over to more remote individuals via interjacent agents. In
practice, this may happen when an extreme party shapes the language of a discourse in
a certain direction, and while not everyone may be prone to listening to the party itself,
10 Simon Scheller

Figure 3. Exemplary BC run with
i ¼ 0:1 and a party with Φ ¼ 0:01 and
¼ 0:30 .

certain features of their position and rhetoric may carry over to ideologically more distant
individuals through intermediaries.
Figure 3 displays the same model run as both previous examples before. The gray
area depicts the size of the party’s appeal
¼ 0:3 , and hence the party’s desired sphere
of influence.12 In this example, the party is exerting a relatively strong appeal to fear,
resulting in an increase in followership from 15 to 37.
From a technical point of view, there are no restrictions as to the available strategies
for different actors. Such limitations, however, clearly exist in practice. For example, it is
not straight forward whether or not centrist and non-centrist parties could employ appeals
to fear equally easily. However, since fear appeals constitute a particularly salient strategy
among extreme populist parties, and are, as such frequently studied in the literature,
I focus my analysis on fear appeals by parties with extreme positions (0  Φ  0:2 ).
A broader application of the framework is possible and most certainly constitutes
a pathway for further fruitful research, but would require contextual analysis up to
a level that is unsuited for the nature and scope of this paper.13

Results

Design of the Simulation Experiment

Before turning to analysing the impact of emotional appeals in the now fully described
model framework, some simplifications in analogy to previous works studying the BC
model (e.g. Hegselmann & Krause, 2015) require clarification. These simplifications
keep the parameter space manageable for the subsequent analysis.
First, for reasons of simplicity and space, this study starts out by scrutinizing the
strategies for one party only. This constitutes a reasonable starting point for model
analysis because it allows focussing on the interaction between voters and a certain
party. It can be followed up by multi-party scenarios, for which this analysis can function
as a baseline.
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 11

Second, all voters start out with homogeneous confidence bounds. This is a standard
assumption in the BC-framework. Hegselmann and Krause (2002, 2006, 2015) and many
others work under that assumption. Others, like Lorenz (2010) study the impact of
heterogeneous bounds of confidence explicitly. Since heterogeneity is introduced through
the party’s emotional appeals, differences in emotional states develop endogeneously and
can be easier disentangled through this assumption.
Third, the initial opinion profile xð0Þ is chosen according to a fixed equidistant
distribution: 100 agents are placed on the [0,1] interval with equal distance to each other.
Hegselmann and Krause (2015), also making use of the equidistant distribution, show that
minor changes in
can have a strong, non-monotonic impact on outcomes. Fixing xð0Þ
enables us to easily compare different parametrisations, as tipping-point effects could
otherwise be hidden through randomly initialised values.14
Fourth,
ð0Þ, the confidence bound all agents start out with, is set to
ð0Þ ¼ 0:1. This
can be equated with a moderate to relatively low initial openness for other opinions, and
could be interpreted as a state of relative emotional calmness where partisanship plays
a relatively important role. Agents’ confidence bounds, then, can be potentially increased
through a party’s fear propaganda.15

Overall Results
The overall goal of this enquiry is to analyze the strategic possibilities of fear appeals for
extreme parties. To assess a party’s success in maximizing electoral support, the number
of regular voters that end up approximately16 at the party’s position at the end of a model
run is used as a proxy measure. This group of agents is referred to as followers. Hence,
the paper’s core interest lies in
’s influence on the number of followers.
Crucially, the party’s position Φ on the left-right opinion spectrum must be con-
sidered in interaction with the emotional appeals it employs, as a party’s positioning
constitutes one of its central characteristics. Figure 4 reports the number of followers for
various values of the fear-appeal-strength
and party position Φ . Call this plot the
follower landscape.17

Figure 4. The follower-landscape.

12 Simon Scheller

The horizontal dimension represents the intensity of the party’s fear appeal
: At the
very left, since
¼ 0:1 ¼
ð0Þ the party does not alter people’s emotional states. The
further to the right one goes, the stronger the party’s fear appeal becomes.
The vertical dimension represents the party’s position Φ : At the bottom of Figure 4
lie the cases where the party takes up the most extreme positions on the opinion spectrum.
The further up one goes, the more moderate the party’s position becomes.18
Figure 4 displays a complex pattern with sudden jumps from high follower numbers
(darker regions) to low follower numbers (light gray; white indicates no followers),
wheareas both fear appeal strength
and party position Φ seem to have an impact on
follower numbers. Hegselmann and Krause (2015) detect patterns of a similar nature
when analyzing the influence of radical groups on opinion dynamics. Hence, the occur-
rence of such patterns itself is not unusual. The key issue for analyzing and interpreting
the model outcomes is to understand how the specific distribution of high and low
follower numbers comes about. Once the generating mechanisms for the patterns are
understood, conclusions about the conditions for successful use of emotional appeals can
be drawn.
Two features in Figure 4 stand out: First, For weak fear appeals (small
), an
increase in
mildly increases follower numbers. At a certain threshold level of

however, follower numbers experience a sudden drop to zero. Second, for stronger fear
appeals (i.e. further to the right), a parameter region occurs where follower numbers
experience sudden and strong upward jumps, only to fade again for even larger values of

. For the analysis of these phenomena, it is neccessary to look at the opinion dynamics
of the individual model runs, as these depict the process of how the number of followers
in a given case is produced.

Individual Model Run Dynamics

Looking at individual model runs is equivalent to ‘zooming in’ into a single point in
Figure 4. Subsequently, exemplary runplots at decisive points are depicted to illustrate the
mechanisms that generate the overall patterns. These individual runs are referenced R1 to
R5 in Figure 4.
For the area on the left side of Figure 4, weak appeals slightly increase followership.
Thus, moderate appeals to fear are beneficial for an extreme party. However, there is
a clear maximum to this rationale: When increasing the intensity of fear appeals,
followership suddenly drops to zero.
Runs R1 and R2 serve as explanatory examples for this phenomenon and are
displayed in Figure 5. In these examples, the party holds the most extreme position of
Φ ¼ 0 , and its emotional appeal
is represented by the surrounding gray area. The
crucial difference between R1 and R2 consists in the fact that in one case, the voter
cluster closest to the party splits away from the rest of the voter population and is pulled
towards the party (R1). In the other case, these voters remain connected to the rest of the
population and are eventually pulled towards the adjoining moderate cluster of voters and
therefore out of the party’s reach (R2 ).
What is the role of the party’s
-strategy in this process? Obviously, increasing the
voter’s
i does not only make those close to the party more prone to being influenced by
the party. Since those voters become more open for influence by others in general, they
are also influenced by a larger number of voters from the opposite side.
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 13

Figure 5. Exemplary runplots R1 and R2 .

Furthermore, the moderate voters are not under the direct influence of the party’s fear
appeal; hence they exhibit lower
i -values. This explains why these moderate voters are
not pulled towards the extreme end of the spectrum. Also, the extreme voters leave the
party’s influence eventually: Once they are pulled away far enough from the party, their
i
decreases again through the moderate cluster’s moderating influence.
This dynamic process underlines the fact that evoking fear for strategic purposes
constitutes a two-edged sword: More people are potentially attracted by the party when
their openness is increased. Yet, these people are also attracted more strongly by opposing
forces when openness becomes even larger.
A particular risk for a party who wants to use fear appeals consists in the asymmetric
logic of influence. When there are two groups of agents – one with larger confidence
bounds than the other – the final position of the combined cluster will be shifted in favour
14 Simon Scheller

of those with the smaller
i , since they are not influnced as early as the group with the
larger
. A similar effect is described in Lorenz (2010). To counter this logic, a party
needs to combine fear appeals with a strong positional influence. Otherwise, one-sided
attraction forces will most likely pull its core supporters away.
Let us now turn to the parameter region on the right hand side of Figure 4 where
high follower numbers abruptly switch to no followership and vice versa. Looking at
the the exemplary runplots R3 , R4 and R5 presented in Figure 6 illuminates a similar
yet more general effect as already described: The main cause for the abrupt changes in
follower numbers appears to be a large cluster of voters (marked “D ”) located in
between the party (marked “P ”) and a large cluster of more moderate voters (marked
“M ”). In analogy to a parabola by the French philosopher Jean Buridan, call this in-
between cluster Buridan’s Donkeys.
In Buridan’s story, a donkey faces a choice between two haystacks which are equally
far away and equally appealing to her. Due to her indifference between the two haystacks,
she is unable to decide which one to go to and, as a result, ends up starving. Being caught
between two equally strong forces of attraction, the behavior of the voter cluster is in
a very similar position. As outlined below, this effect constitutes a crucial generative
mechanisms for the model’s outcomes.
On the extreme end, the party (P ) constitutes a fixed attractor by definition, as the
party does not change its position. On the other side, the adjoining moderate cluster (M )
constitutes a (temporarily) fixed attractor as well, since their
is too small for this cluster
to be influenced by the donkeys in turn. As long as Buridan’s Donkeys (D ) are caught
between these two poles, the situation constitutes an instable equilibrium for two reasons:
● First, the donkey-cluster can leave the sphere of attraction of one of the poles. As
soon as this happens, the influence becomes one-sided. If the party remains the sole
influence on the donkeys (for example R3 in Figure 6), they approach the party’s
position hyperbolically. If the moderate cluster becomes the sole influence over the
donkeys, the two clusters usually merge together after very few timesteps (as in R4
in Figure 6).
● Second, the moderate cluster may be influenced by the donkeys itself. This triggers
a dynamic process in which the moderates approach the donkeys quickly, while the
donkeys themselves are held in balance by the party. As soon as they merge
together into one big cluster, both the donkeys and the former moderates are pulled
towards the party’s extreme position rather quickly. This causes the large numbers
of followers in the parameter regions to the right: Not only Buridan’s donkeys are
pulled towards the party, also the closest adjoining cluster is sucked in. R5 in
Figure 6 constitutes an example thereof. This vividly illustrates the potentially
powerful influence of fear appeals: When fear spread towards moderate individuals
through intermediaries, an extreme party’s influence can extend well beyond her
direct reach.
Small changes in distances and
i influence in which direction the dynamic goes,
resulting in either very strong support for the party, or none at all. In most cases, the
equilibrium eventually tips into one of the two directions and the donkey cluster either
merges with the party or the moderates. Similar effects have also been analysed with
regards to (no) consensus-formation in the BC framework by Lorenz (2007, p. 36f).
From a strategic perspective, the Buridan’s donkey effect carries central importance
for the strategic use of fear appeals. As illustrated by Figure 4, the interplay between fear-
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 15

Figure 6. Exemplary runplots R3 , R4 , and R5 .

16 Simon Scheller

appeals
and party position Φ determines whether or not the party is able to attract
a large group of followers. The intensity of the fear appeals
needs to be large enough
so as to initialize bridging the gap between the party and moderate voter groups. Yet,
when
becomes too large, the party’s impact will always be overruled since agents with
extremely large confidence bounds will be under the impact of more other voters – hence
the white area to the very right of Figure 4.
The argument is essentially equivalent to the explanation for the abrupt drop in
followership analysed earlier: Spreading fear is a two-edged sword since fearful voters
are also attracted by a larger group of other voters. The crucial determinant for the
success of strong fear appeals turns out to be the distance between the party and the
moderate cluster. This distance has a major influence on how the Buridan’s Donkeys
situation above is resolved:
● If the distance is large, it is more likely that a significant group of voters breaks
away from the rest of the voters and ends up at the party’s extreme position.
● If the distance is intermediate, the moderate cluster (the nextmost stable cluster
towards the middle of the opinion space) is close enough to influence the donkey-
cluster, yet far enough not to be drawn into the party’s sphere of influence itself.
● If the distance is small, the moderate cluster is first attracted by the donkeys, and
then attracted by the party itself, leading to an even larger support for the (now not
so extreme) party.
A crucial role therefore also falls to voters who stand in between – those who are
under the influence of the party on one side and a cluster of moderate voters on the
opposite side. In those situations, minor changes decide whether these undecided voters
end up at the moderate’s position or approach the party. Then, the party should aim at
splitting the in-between-group away from the rest of the population’s influence. This
requires taking a position that is clearly distinct from other groups, or alternatively: to
move very close to the moderate cluster so that they easily become influenced by the
party themselves. Never should a party carry out either of those strategies half-heartedly,
as this is more likely to lead to core voters being led away from the party without gaining
influence over any other groups.

Conclusion
This paper has set out to examine the strategic role of fear appeals, which has been
identified as a central building block of populist rhetoric by extreme parties. When
political actors can evoke people’s fears, people’s reliance on partisan habits decrease
and they become more open for new information. This potentially provides parties with
an effective tool to reach broader voter audiences, but also bears the risk of losing core
supporters through the increased openness to competing groups. For fear appeals to be
successful, the analysis found that a party’s position plays a decisive role: A party should
aim at increasing its reach through strong fear appeals only if it is able to clearly distance
itself from ideological competitors, or when it can closely approximate the core audi-
ence’s position. Whether or not political actors follow such strategic advice in practice is
certainly a different question (Ridout & Searles, 2011).
The logic discovered by the model also provides general insights into the incentives of
extreme parties beyond the classic median voter argument by Downs (1957), and its manifold
successors. For instance, if a party wants to use strong fear appeals to attract supporters, its
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 17

position needs to be either clearly different compared to other groups, or very similar.
Formulated as a strategic imperative, a party needs to either distance itself from potential
competitors, or approach them directly. Notably, this conforms with arguments brought
forward by, for example, Kitschelt and McGann (1997) and Wagner (2012), who argue that
small parties have an incentive to differentiate themselves from mainstream parties by taking
more extreme positions as a matter of political product differentiation.
A similar argument was also derived by Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) based on
their model of directional voting preferences: assuming a certain radius of acceptability
for policy positions (very similar to the confidence bounds employed here), they show
that extreme positions are just as appealing as moderate positions when voters are evenly
distributed, and can even turn out to be beneficial when they allow an actor to push an
agenda more aggressively (Rabinowitz & Macdonald, 1989, p. 109f).
Doubtlessly, this project deals with complex subject matters in a simplifying way. To
some extent, however, this should rather be seen as a strength rather than a weakness.
Instead of high-level descriptive accuracy, the model offers a way to put certain key
variables at the center of attention, and to isolate characteristic causal mechanisms, as is
appropriate with regards to the paper’s research question. As argued by Smith and Conrey
(2007), agent-based models are particularly well suited for theorizing micro-macro
transfers for findings from social psychology in this way.
At the same time, this certainly implies a variety of limitations of the presented
research. For example, only single-party scenarios are analysed, and different distribu-
tions of voters on the opinion space are disregarded. It can be speculated based on the
results of this study that the underlying mechanism (the Buridan’s donkey effect) is also
effective in multiparty scenarios. For example, a second party would constitute an equal
(yet potentially stronger) fixed attractor as the moderate cluster in the analysis above. In
that limited sense, the obtained results can be transferred to multi-party scenarios.
However, strategic incentives in a two party system are certainly different and more
complex: While a single party has to deal only with the structural uncertainty of voter
dispersion, competing parties must also foresee their opponent’s choices, and, as a result,
fear appeals may constitute best responses for extreme parties only to some actions of
moderate parties. Also, new effects may occur when emotional appeals from multiple
sources compete, which cannot be foreseen based on the presented analysis. For reasons
of conciseness and space, such endeavours remain beyond the scope of this paper, yet
provide potentially fruitful avenues for further research.
As a more general limitation, the obtained results are purely theoretical in nature
even though they are substantially based on empirical findings. Direct empirical research
is needed to complement this paper’s theoretical considerations. For instance, studies
could try to identify links between populist communication and individual attitudes
relative to their respective ideological positioning, and how this relationship evolves
dynamically. Issue-specific case studies that simultaneously track populist rhetoric and
public sentiment would constitute an equally important—yet difficult—step.
Further, this realisation implies clear limitations for the applicability of this study’s
results. For the purpose of explaining observed empirical patterns of emotional appeals
and voting behaviour, such as those described in Vasilopoulos et al. (2018a, 2018b), the
presented model would need to incorporate all causally effective components. For
example, audience-specific communication channels or emotional appeals that change
over time are not accounted for in the presented model. Only when considering all
relevant factors can an assessment of empirical patterns based on a theoretical model
18 Simon Scheller

be ventured. In a more limited fashion, this paper therefore claims that the described
mechanism, ceteris paribus, should be expected to have the illustrated effects. However,
other effects may also occur and impact electoral outcomes. The theoretical claim in this
paper therefore clearly falls within this ceteris paribus limitation, and, hence, does not
justify direct and unrefracting applications.
Similarly, the paper’s focus on fear-appeals and the implied disregard of other
emotional appraisals certainly limits the applicability of the results. Particularly the
evocation of anger may run counter to fear-appeals. If anger and anxiety are simulta-
neously evoked, one would need to pay closer attention to how people’s information
processing is affected. In that sense, this paper provides a crucial part of the picture
regarding fear-appeals, but not the full picture when it comes to emotional appeals more
generally. This focus allows us a more thorough analysis, but needs to be kept in mind
nonetheless.
In summary, this paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, from
a practical point of view, the analysis provides an imortant building block for under-
standing a variety of real world phenomena by discussing and explaining one central
strategic imperatives for political actors (among potentially others). Several right wing
parties in Europe, for example, utilize instances of crime and terror to spread fear among
the population. This boosts attention to their positions on their core ideological issues
which would, in other times, simply be ignored. While many centrist parties have tried to
clearly distance themselves from more extremist parties, it seems that at least to some
extent, they should aim at reducing ideological distances instead. One might regard this as
ideological weakness, yet according to the model’s logic, this may constitute a strategic
move that builds bridges for otherwise undecided middle-ground voters. Extreme parties,
in turn, may eventually be forced to decide between moderation or isolation.
Second, this paper provides theoretical guidance for further research in an area of
empirical inaccessibility. A variety of hypotheses can be deduced from the arguments in
this paper: For example, when extremist political movements are rising to prominence on
a wave of exploiting people’s fears, they may experience a crucial point in time where
they either manage to establish an isolated base of hardcore-followers, or where their
prominence fades in light of a moderation of discourse in favour of more moderate forces.
For further research into the strategic use of fear appeals in political communication, the
model’s theoretical insights provide a solid basis.

Funding
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation and the Humboldt-
Foundation.

Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://
doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1631918.

Notes
1. The terms ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ are often used synonymously in the literature on political
psychology (and also in colloquial language and politics). In the psychological literature more
generally, some authors (e.g. Davis, Walker, Miles, and Grillon (2009)) distinguish the two
 The Strategic Use of Fear Appeals 19

with regards to whether some event is appraised as certain or uncertain. For reasons of
complying with the former (and for this paper arguably more relevant) literature, I will use the
terms interchangeably, but will refer to an understanding of fear/anxiety as an uncertainty-
inducing emotional response, as explained later in more detail.
2. Some authors, e.g. Ladd and Lenz (2008) provide a more critical perspective on AIT’s
findings, arguing that affect transfer and endogenous affect formation might also explain
some of the results. These are, in turn disputed in Marcus, MacKuen, and Neuman (2011).
Further, note that a rich literature on the impact of other discrete emotions (e.g. enthusiasm,
anger) exists as well, which cannot be appropriately dealt with here due to reasons of focus
(Huddy, Feldman, & Cassese, 2007; Parker & Isbell, 2010; Rico et al., 2017; Salmela & von
Scheve, 2017; Steenbergen & Ellis, 2006; Weeks, 2015), but could be fruitfully considered in
a consecutive analysis.
3. There are, of course, also limits to extent to which fear or other emotional appeals can be
effective, particularly for framed threats that concern societal and political issues (Albertson
& Gadarian, 2015). The ability to induce fear is limited for instance by people’s feeling of
self-efficacy in a given situation (Witte, 1992; Witte & Allen, 2000), a message’s perceived
manipulativeness (Dillard & Shen, 2005), or partisanship (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015).
4. Formally, the model is characterised by n 2 N agents with xi ðtÞ 2 ½0; 1. Further, xðtÞ denotes
the profile of all opinions at time t . Agent i ’s influencing set Ii is given as Ii ð
i ; xðtÞÞ ¼
fjj jxi ðtÞ  xj ðtÞj 
i g . Logically, Ii always includes agent i herself. This implies the
following rule for opinion-updating:

P
j2Ii xj ðtÞ
xi ðt þ 1Þ ¼ ;
#Ii

where #Ii is the number of agents in the influencing set Ii .

5. Note that the BC model can explain polarisation only in the narrow sense that two distinct
opinion clusters form; it does not explain polarisation in the sense of two clusters moving
further apart over time.
6. Analogous considerations apply to similar antagonistic dynamics, e.g. Vasilopoulos et al.
(2018a); Redlawsk, Civettini, and Emmerson (2018); Vasilopoulou and Wagner (2017), or
interaction effects that would complicate the role of partisanship (MacKuen et al., 2007).
7. See for instance Virag (2008) for a similar model.
8. In a series of robustness analyses, the parameter φ generalised the party’s strength beyond
values of 10. This variation produced qualitatively stable results and expectable limiting cases
for extreme parameter values. This robustness analyisis is documented in the online-appendix.
9. Formally, a party k ’s updating rule for her position Φ is: Φðt þ 1Þ ¼ ΦðtÞ ¼ Φ . If jxi ðtÞ 
Φj 
i , the influencing-set of agent i includes the party k, and does not include the party if
jxi ðtÞ  Φj 
i . Thus, the updating-rule for an agent’s opinion is formally expressed as

P 
j2Ii xj ðtÞ þ Φ  10  Ind 1 for jxi ðtÞ  Φj 
i ;
xi ðt þ 1Þ ¼ ; with Ind ¼ :
#Ii þ 10  Ind 0 otherwise
10. Appeals that aim at reducing agents’ confidence bounds could analogously be interpreted as appeals
to anger or enthusiasm. For reasons of space, they are not explicitly considered in this paper.
11. Technically, confidence bounds of regular agents are updated according to

P
j2Ii
j ðtÞ þ
 10  Ind

i ðt þ 1Þ ¼
#Ii þ 10  Ind
20 Simon Scheller

A party’s emotional appeal is assumed to be constant during the course of a model

run. Further, note that a somewhat similar dynamic process has also been studied in
(Deffuant, Amblard, Weisbuch, & Faure, 2002).
12. In Figure 2, the party did not yet exert any influence on
, hence desired and actual sphere of
influence were trivially congruent.
13. Figure S1 in the appendix provides data for larger parameter ranges.
14. For a more detailed justification of the equidistant distribution, see Hegselmann and Krause
(2015). Note that Lorenz (2006) identifies certain drawbacks of using this distribution,
particularly that its symmetry artificially increases convergence times. Despite those issues
(and also because they are not directly relevant to this analysis), the equidistant distribution is
chosen for this analysis because it most easily allows us to study the individual model runs
that produced a certain outcome. With averaging done over many runs with different random
values, one would have to stumble across these tipping phenomena coincidentally.
A robustness analysis with several random initial distributions that were fixed over the
whole parameter space showed that the qualitative results described below also occur.
Some examples can be found in the online-appendix, where also other modifications of xð0Þ
are considered.
15. Robustness checks have been carried out for various values of
ð0Þ , showing that the
substential findings persist over the relevant parameter range. See online-appendix.
16. Practically, a model run stops as soon as agent movements are all smaller than 0:001 per round.
Every voter no further than 0:1 from the party’s position is considered a follower of the party.
17. All results presented in this section are qualitatively robust against variation in the parameters

ð0Þ and φ and only become overlain by other effects when the parameters take exteme
values. These robustness checks are documented in the separate online-appendix.
18. The analysis deliberately excludes more moderate positions in the analysis due to the initially
prescribed focus on extreme parties. As Figure S1 in the appendix shows, the pattern repeats
itself in that parameter region. So do the underlying causal mechanisms.

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