Threats and the conservative shift in public opinion: comparative causal mediation analyses from Turkey

ABSTRACT How do mortality reminders and aroused mortality fear affect people’s conservatism? Threats-politics studies assume that life-threatening dangers, fear of death, and conservatism go together, overlooking the distinction between threat exposure and mortality fear arousal. Further, these studies commonly fixate on the conventional threat of terrorism and predominantly employ samples from Western countries. Complementing past research, I use three survey experiments in Turkey to investigate the relationship between a broad array of threats (terrorism, health risks, moral hazards, and daily thoughts of death’s inevitability), mortality fear induced by the threats, and self-rated conservative orientation in a causal mediation analysis framework, using the terror management theory and non-representative Facebook samples (2018, 2020). The results reveal that the respondents receiving threatening stimuli (particularly terrorism mortality reminder) become less conservative as the mortality fear elevates. The length of mortality priming and the broader study context influence this indirect effect’s significance and replicability.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Southeast European and Black Sea Studies

• Publication date

  2023-03-13

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/14683857.2023.2189541
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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