Effects of threat sensitivity and issue concern on candidate preference

There is extensive debate in the literature over the link between threat and political attitudes – while some find evidence that threat and threat sensitivity lead to political conservatism, others find that the effect of threat is more contextual. We contribute to this debate by theorizing that the link between threat and politics is based on both individual differences and political rhetoric. First, sensitivity about personal threats predicts greater concern about political threats as well. This issue concern may in turn be directed toward either conservatism or liberalism through political rhetoric and elite positioning. Using one observational and one experimental survey of American adults conducted in 2018 and 2023, we find consistent evidence that personal threat sensitivity increases issue concern regardless of the specific issue or its partisan ownership, and independent of partisanship or ideology. This increased issue concern does not produce a uniformly conservative shift – rather, an increase in concern about “Republican” issues leads to greater preference for Republican candidates, and vice versa for Democrats. The relationship between threat sensitivity and political attitudes is thus best understood as a contextual one.