Insecurity and policy preferences: how economic and physical threats shape attitudes toward social welfare and criminal justice

Despite frequent portrayals of the current political situation as an “age of insecurity”, we still know very little about the effects of insecurity on policy attitudes. In this paper, we explore the effect of economic and physical insecurity on two key policy domains: social welfare and criminal justice. While the majority of scholars in political science expect instrumental, domain-specific effects of insecurity, several psychological and sociological theories posit a more generalized, cross-domain politics of fear, with a bias toward punitive responses. We empirically test these logics with a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Denmark and Germany (N = 2,010), which includes a novel manipulation of economic and physical insecurity. Our findings are clearly in line with the instrumental and protective logic and do not support the scenario of all-encompassing and punitive “politics of fear”.