Emotions, Issue Importance, and Political Learning

Theory: Theories about the effects of individual or group threat (largely psychological in origin) are combined with theories about the role of issue importance and of hope of success. Hypotheses: Anxiety, or threat, has an indirect effect on political learning (through issue importance); the effects of anxiety depend, interactively, on people's hope of success regarding the issue at hand. Knowledge and importance have a reciprocal relationship, the importance-to-knowledge connection being the stronger of the two. Methods: Two-stage least squares, using data from a 1990 survey on the linguistic behavior of young people in Quebec. Checked with an ordered probit and diagnostic tests. Results: Results confirm indirect, interactive, reciprocal effects. Standard (control) effects also found for education, gender, exposure to news on knowledge.