Pandemic threat and authoritarian attitudes in Europe: An empirical analysis of the exposure to COVID-19
| Author | Maximilian Filsinger,Markus Freitag |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165221082517 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Pandemic threat and
authoritarian attitudes in
Europe: An empirical
analysis of the exposure to
COVID-19
Maximilian Filsinger
Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
Markus Freitag
Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
Abstract
While analysis of the impact of threatening events has moved from bit player to center stage in
political science in recent decades, the phenomenon of pandemic threat is widely neglected in
terms of a systematic research agenda. Tying together insights from the behavioral immune
system hypothesis and standard political science models of emotional processing, we evaluate
whether exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic threat is related to authoritarian attitudes and
which emotions do the work. Using 12 samples with over 12,000 respondents from six
European countries at two time points (2020 and 2021), we argue that pandemic threats
can generate disgust, anger, and fear. Our analyses indicate that exposure to the COVID-
19 pandemic threat particularly activates fear, which in turn is linked to authoritarian attitudes.
Keywords
Affective intelligence theory, authoritarian attitudes, behavioral immune system,
comparative politics, pandemic threat
Introduction
The spread of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has produced a crisis unprece-
dented in modern history (Weible et al., 2020). The Johns-Hopkins-University has
Corresponding author:
Maximilian Filsinger, Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern 3012, Switzerland.
Email: maximilian.filsinger@unibe.ch
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(3) 417–436
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165221082517
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
counted over five million deaths by January 2022 (Johns Hopkins University, 2022). To
that end, the current pandemic poses a serious threat to citizens around the world.
Conventional wisdom associates external threats with an increase in authoritarian attitudes,
that is, ‘basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related,
strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy’
(Duckitt and Bizumic,2013: 842). Yet, in this respect severalquestions remain unanswered
(Duckitt, 2013). First, with regard to the mechanism that connects threat and authoritarian
attitudes, studies have provided inconclusive results with some scholars reporting fear as
the driving force (Albertson and Gadarian, 2015; Huddy et al., 2005; Oesterreich, 2005)
while others argue that anger or disgust is the main determinant (Marcus et al., 2019;
Murray and Schaller, 2016; Vasilopoulos et al., 2018; Vasilopoulos et al., 2019).
Second, it remains unclear whether authoritarian attitudes develop in the wake of every
threat, or whetherthere are differences regardingthreat situations. Finally,it is questionable
whether authoritarianism can be treated empirically as a unidimensional concept.
This is the starting point of our investigation.
1
We use the current COVID-19 pandemic
to investigate whether pandemic threat is related to authoritarian attitudes among citizens in
six European countries. Combining insights from evolutionary psychology and standard pol-
itical science models of emotional processing, we argue that emotions such as disgust, fear,
and anger triggered by the perception of this public health threat shape how citizens form
their political attitudes. Key to this understanding is that the ‘psychological footprint [of
the pandemic] will likely be larger than the medical footprint’(Taylor, 2019: 23).
We use two original surveys conducted during the second and third COVID-19 waves
(November 2020–January 2021 and April–May 2021) with over 12,000 respondents
from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (UK).
While disgust and anger appear unrelated according to our empirical analyses, we find
evidence that the appraisal of the pandemic threat is critical in predicting the fear that
it will stimulate and, therefore, the impact that exposure to it will have on authoritarian
attitudes. This relationship is particularly evident in Germany, Switzerland and, to a
lesser extent, in the UK and Italy but not in France and Spain. It seems that
pandemic-induced fear does not translate into authoritarian attitudes in countries with
less protection of individual liberties (France and Spain), while in countries with more
emphasis on the protection of individual liberties, fearful citizens submit themselves to
the protective authority of the state by adopting authoritarian attitudes. Lastly, looking
at the subdimensions of authoritarian attitudes, fear mainly affects authoritarian submis-
sion, which is often declared as the core of authoritarianism (Passini, 2015).
Overall, our study contributes to the literature in several aspects. First, although the
empirical investigation of the impact of threatening events –such as civil war, terrorism,
economic recession, and natural disasters –on social and political attitudes has moved
from bit player to center stage in political science, the phenomenon of pandemic threat
is widely neglected in terms of a systematic research agenda. Second, while the world
has been repeatedly hit by pandemics such as Spanish flu, SARS, and swine flu, the emer-
gence of COVID-19 now allows to analyze the impact of exposure to a pandemic threat
on political preferences in a real-world situation. Third, although political psychologists
have focused on neural process theories (Marcus et al., 2000), evolutionary biologists and
418 European Union Politics 23(3)
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