Generalized Anxiety and Political Participation

<p>News media relies on widespread discussion of anxiety and emotions to describe the environment of presidential elections. Previous academic literature has sought to capture and examine the impact that situational anxiety had on voter turnout, information, decision-making, and perception. However, there has not been a clarified distinction between anxiety that is endogenous to the political environment, and general anxiety experienced by individuals.</p> <p>Approximately 18% of the US adult population has generalized anxiety (National Institute of Mental Health, Anxiety Disorders Association of America). These individuals largely have been ignored by political science research. This article seeks to establish a difference between political anxiety (“PA”) and generalized anxiety (“GA”). Distinguishing the two types of anxiety is important to political psychology because both types of anxiety have different effects and outcomes on political behavior and participation.</p> <p>This distinction leads to the question: How does generalized anxiety impact political behavior and participation compared to political anxiety? I expect that generalized anxiety will have a negative impact on numerous forms of political participation. This contrasts the pro-political behavior that has been shown with political anxiety.</p> <p>Generalized anxiety defined as a characteristic can help guide the differentiation with PA. Previous work has considered socialization important to political behavior, or lack thereof. As each individual enters the election environment with attitudes or specific policy opinions, so too do they enter with emotions and emotional characteristics that differentiate them from the normative public. This difference can manifest itself in numerous ways.</p> <p>Additionally, people acquire new emotions about political context in a similar fashion that they develop new opinions and thoughts about the context. However, negative ramifications of predisposed anxious individuals should elicit a response that is inherently different compared to those whose emotions arise solely out of the political context. For individuals who do not have anxiety (GA), their level of anxiety entering the election environment is 0 as a constant. However, compounding different anxieties onto an individual whose anxiety constant is not 0 would amplify the impact that the cumulative anxiety has on their behavior.</p> <p>Anxiety in psychological research is often considered an encumbrance to information processing. While information plays a crucial role in all political outcomes, and is a part of the theoretical framework provided in this piece. Future research should attempt to establish the relationship with information more clearly with regard to generalized anxiety.</p> <p>The manifestation of PA and GA theoretically should create different outcomes due to the compounding effects that anxiety has. Political anxiety is shown to increase pro-political behaviors (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000 hereby “MNM”; Brader 2011). I hypothesize that GA decreases individuals’ propensity to participate in politics. The expectation is that generalized anxiety will decrease individual’s propensity to register to vote, vote, encourage others to vote, pay attention to politics, and is associated negatively with their prior reported voting behavior.</p> <p>I propose a differentiation of two types of anxiety along with a new measurement technique for generalized anxiety. This device is placed at the beginning of the survey, and includes no political references to ensure that there is not a priming problem in the measurement. The differentiation between political anxiety and general anxiety will guide future extensions into research on emotions and their effect on political participation in the election environment.</p>