Emotional responses shape the substance of information seeking under conditions of threat

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordMenacing news inclines individuals to acquire information, and research has explored how emotional reactions such as fear or anger condition this process. While scholars have debated the relevance of fear and anger for levels of attentiveness and learning in politics, fewer studies consider how variation in emotional responses can shape the substance of information searches in times of threat.We posit that heightened fear motivates interest in defense-oriented information among threatened individuals, while heightened anger motivates interest in aggression-oriented information. To test these hypotheses, we focus on international terrorist threat because of its known tendency to elevate both anger and fear. We use data that permit a behavioral measure of information seeking, via an experiment embedded within a dynamic process tracing environment (DPTE) platform. Within this information-rich context, exposure to terrorist threat motivates a search for relevant information. Further, we find that while an induction to elevate anger prompts more immediate attention to aggression-oriented information, an induction to elevate fear is more effective in steering attention toward defense-oriented information

Mass-elite congruence and representation in Argentina

participants at the workshop “Making Democracy Count ” at the Universidad Diego Portales. All translations are our own. 1 In representative democracies, policymakers should reflect the policy preferences of citizens (Manin 1997; Pitkin 1967). Scholars have long assumed that citizens elect representatives whose platforms are closest to their own preferences (e.g., Downs 1957). And models of accountability assume that elites have incentives not to stray too far from the preferences of sanctioning voters (e.g., Ferejohn 1986). But how close are politicians’ preferences to those of their constituents? Do they indeed reflect an aggregation of citizens’ preferences, or do they prioritize some citizens over others? These questions are not merely empirical curiosities. If policymakers and policies do not reflect the preferences of citizens, a democratic system ought to hold them to account. In a properly function representative democracy, these should be off-equilibrium instances. Voters should quickly replace elites who are not representing their preferences with others who will. If, for some reason, they cannot do so, they may become disillusioned with democratic institutions