Fear and citizen coordination against dictatorship
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629818809425 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(1) 103–125
ÓThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629818809425
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Fear and citizen coordination
against dictatorship
Abraham Aldama
Wilf Family Department of Politics,New York University,USA
Mateo Va
´squez-Corte
´s
Wilf Family Department of Politics,New York University,USA
Lauren Elyssa Young
Department of PoliticalScience, University of California, USA
Abstract
Despite numerous studiesshowing that emotions influence political decision making, there is scant
literature giving a formal treatment to this phenomenon. This paper formalizesinsights about how
fear influences participation in risky collective action such as citizen revolt against an autocratic
regime. To do so we build a global game andanalyze the effects that fear may have on participation
through increasing pessimism about the regime’s strength, increasing pessimism about the partici-
pation of others in the revolution, and increasing risk aversion. The impactof the first two effects
of fear is a clear reduction in the probability that peoplewill mobilize. However, an increase in risk
aversion may in some circumstances increase the probability with which citizens will mobilize.
These results may help explain the unpredictable reactions of citizens to fear appeals, including
the threat of repressive violence.
Keywords
Coordination; emotions; fear; globalgame; regime change
Corresponding author:
Abraham Aldama, Wilf Family Department of Politics,New York University,19 West 4th Street, 2nd Floor,
New York, NY 10012, USA.
Email: aan314@nyu.edu
1. Introduction
Emotions affect political behavior. A large literature in psychology has established
that emotions such as fear, anger, and happiness affect beliefs, preferences, and
decision-making, particularly in situations involving risk and cooperation
(Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996; Lerner and Keltner, 2000, 2001). These findings
have subsequently sparked a large research agenda on American political behavior
(Albertson and Gadarian, 2015; Brader, 2005; Marcus et al., 2000; Valentino et al.,
2011), and have recently been applied to the study of participation in high-risk con-
tentious politics (Pearlman, 2016; Aytac et al., 2017; Young, 2015, Forthcoming).
However, despite the increasing influence that these findings in psychology have
had on the empirical study of political science, the role of emotions has not been
given much treatment in the formal theoretic literature (Elster, 1996), with a few
important exceptions (Akerlof, 2016; Caplin and Leahy, 2001; Lupia and Menning,
2009; Wu, 1999). This omission is important for several reasons. First, given that
emotions have been shown to have numerous effects on cognition, formal analysis
may provide insight into the ways that emotions affect decisions in strategic situa-
tions. Second, a formal treatment may provide insights into the conditions in which
emotional appeals might have particularly large effects, or counter-intuitive effects.
Ultimately, this analysis may increase our understanding of how emotional appeals
can be used by political elites to cause citizens to act againsttheir long-run interests.
This paper thus builds on efforts to incorporate behavioral assumptions into formal
models such as Lupia and Menning (2009) and Little (2017) that have shown how
deviations from the strict assumption of citizen rationality can have dramatic
effects on the popularity and longevity of a regime.
As part of a larger project in which we seek to understand the effect of fear on
coordination, in this paper we build a model based on a global game (Carlsson and
Van Damme, 1993; Morris and Shin, 2003, 2004) in which people decide whether
or not to take a potentially costly action to overthrow a regime. Based on theory
and empirical findings in psychology and behavioral economics, we analyze various
mechanisms through which this emotion may influence a citizen’s decision to mobi-
lize against the regime. In particular, we focus on two of the most empirically
established effects of fear on decision-making: that it increases pessimism about
risks and increases risk aversion. In our models, fear may increase pessimism about
the strength of the regime; independently, it may increase pessimism about the
number of other citizens who will participate in the mobilization; and finally, it
may increase risk aversion. When people are aware that the other players are also
in a state of fear, its demobilizing effects may compound as not only will players
themselves be more pessimistic and risk averse, but they will expect the same effects
to change the behavior of others.
However, our formal treatment also shows that fear does not necessarily reduce
participation in risky actions, as previous research has suggested. Instead, although
increased pessimism always reduces participation in dissent, the effects of fear
through risk aversion are ambiguous and depend on the effect the citizens’ emo-
tional state on their utility function. The overall effect of fear will be negative when
104 Journal of Theoretical Politics 31(1)
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