Fear and voting preference: The 2024 Taiwan presidential election from an affective intelligence perspective

During the 2024 Taiwan presidential election, the Kuomintang sought to influence voters’ behaviour using a strategy centred on war-based fear – but this strategy did not bring about electoral victory. This study employs affective intelligence theory to examine the outcome of this election. Using a multinomial logistic regression, this study analyses the effects of war-threat perception, candidate security perception, and their interaction on voting choice. The results indicate that candidate security perception significantly influenced support for a candidate: the higher people’s sense of security toward a candidate, the more likely they were to vote for that candidate. Furthermore, we found that war-threat perception yielded different outcomes for candidates emphasising a peace-oriented campaign strategy (the Kuomintang) and those emphasising a confrontation campaign strategy (the Democratic Progressive Party). For the peace-oriented candidate, the level of war-threat perception did not affect the support generated by candidate security perception. In contrast, for the confrontation-oriented candidate, an increase in war-threat perception diminished the support derived from candidate security perception. The implications of these findings are also discussed.