Fear and Political Participation: Evidence from Africa1

Research finds that personal exposure to violence or crime increases political participation. The effects of fear, however, have not been studied. Since the number of victims is much smaller than those who are afraid of becoming a victim, this suggests an important but unexplored channel from crime to political participation. Moreover, if people who experience violence or crime are also afraid of future exposure, existing estimates conflate the effects of past experience with those of fear of future exposure. We find that fear of crime accounts for 10-23 percent of the effect previously attributed to direct exposure. We further find important differences between the effects of fear and victimization on political attitudes. Whereas victims of crimes have more authoritarian political attitudes, people who are fearful of crime are more supportive of democracy and equality, and hold other attitudes that are normally associated with rule of law and democracy. 1 We are grateful to Regina Bateson and Achyuta Adhvaryu and James Fenske for sharing their data, and to Jian Cui, Jonas Gamso, and Jikuo Lu for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to Christopher Claassen, Peter Enns, James Fenske, and Matt Singer for very helpful comments, as well to attendees at presentations at the University of Pittsburgh, the 2014 and 2016 Midwest Political Science Association meetings, the 2014 European Political Science Association meetings. 2 Associate Professor, 3218 Wesley W. Posvar Hall, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; morrison@gspia.pitt. edu, t: 412.624. 7399, f: 412.648. 2605 3 Assistant Professor, 950 Main Street, Department of Economics, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610; mrockmore@clarku.edu. t: 508.793. 7447, f:508.793. 8849 Corresponding Author Exposure to wartime violence (for a review Bauer et al., forthcoming) and, more generally, to commonplace crime (Bateson 2012) is linked to increased prosocial behavior, including political activity (e.g. more likely to vote, act as leaders, etc) (Bateson 2012; Bellows and Miguel 2009; Blattman 2009). While this research helps to understand individual-level behavior, the aggregate implications are unclear. With the possible exception of genocides, relatively few people directly experience violence during conflicts. Even if one expands the focus to crimes of various sorts, the percentage of people with these negative experiences remains limited. Consequently, at the national level (or even sub-national level), the changed behavior of victims may have a limited impact. In contrast to the minority of victims, a much larger number of people are afraid of becoming victims of violence or of crime (i.e are insecure). Globally, the number of insecure is likely quite substantial as roughly 1 in 5 individuals (1.5 billion) live in countries affected by repeated cycles of political or criminal violence (World Bank, 2011). However, to the best our knowledge, the potential effects of insecurity on political participation have not been studied.4 In this paper, we examine the effects of fear of exposure to crime on political participation. We focus on two related questions. First, does this fear affect political participation? Not only are many (more) people exposed to insecurity, but this has important implications for the existing literature. In particular, if fear does affect political participation, then the literature has been conflating the effects of exposure to violence and of insecurity.5 We use self-reported measures of fear of crime, exposure to violence and political participation from two rounds of the Afrobarometer Survey (more than 10,000 respondents from 18+ countries in each round). The results strongly suggest a previously unstudied pathway from crime to political participation as insecurity is correlated with increases in community action, community meetings, protests and political conversations. This pathway appears to be at least as 4 The closest study of which we are aware, Nasir et al. (2016), finds that insecurity leads to the same type of prosocial behavior as victimization. However, it does not examine political activity nor does it measure insecurity directly. 5 If individuals who are exposed to violence are also afraid, in the absence of a separate measure of fear, the estimated coefficient for exposure reflects the effects of both exposure and fear. The true effect of exposure to violence will only be estimated with a separate measure of fear or in the highly unlikely case where the effect of fear is identical among the exposed and non-exposed populations. A similar point is made by Rockmore who separates the effects of insecurity from exposure to war time violence on per capita consumption (forthcoming) and agricultural behavior (2012). important as exposure to violence. The effects of insecurity are statistically indistinguishable from those of exposure while they affect a larger share of the population. Moreover, the inclusion of a measure of insecurity lowers the estimated effect of victimization by 10-23% suggesting that the existing literature on exposure to violence conflates the two effects. Second, we investigate the effect of fear on the “substance” of participation. That is, if people who are afraid participate more, what sort of attitudes do they contribute to society? For example, some existing literature would lead one to think that fear makes people more “authoritarian” in nature (Feldman and Stenner 1997; Marcus et al. 1995). We find no evidence of this. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, we consistently find that people who are fearful of crime are more supportive of democracy and equality, and hold other attitudes that are normally associated with the rule of law and democracy. Since victims hold the opposite views, the aggregate effect of exposure to crime (and, most likely, to violence) on democracy may depend on the relative proportion of victims and insecure individuals. In the next section, we review the relevant literature on victimization, fear, and political participation, detailing the need for systematic empirical analysis in this area. In the third section, we present our empirical strategy and results regarding political participation. A fourth section explores the additional hypotheses about the substance of political participation of those afraid. A fifth section concludes with a summary and implications for the literature. I. Perspectives on victimization, fear, and political participation Why people participate in politics—from attending community meetings to joining a protest to leading a group—is one of the oldest questions in political science and the basis for a massive literature.6 This scholarship underlines the importance of such factors as socioeconomic status, education, age, or gender in determining whether a person participates in politics. And yet, despite all the work in this area, a novel hypothesis has emerged in recent years: the idea that being a victim of crime or violence can spur people to be more active in politics (Bateson 2012; Bellows and Miguel 2009; Blattman 2009). 6 Benchmark works include Brady et al. (1995) and Verba et al. (1978, 1995). From a variety of perspectives, this idea seems surprising. For one, though traumatic life events have been relatively understudied in this literature, the limited evidence suggests that negative events, such as job loss, negatively impact political participation (Rosenstone 1982). And this seems consistent with work in psychology that routinely finds that exposure to political violence has a negative effect on psychological wellbeing (Mghir et al. 1995) and interactions with others (van der Kolk et al. 1996). However, recent studies on the effect of victimization finds increased subsequent participation in politics. Looking at representative surveys from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Bateson (2012) shows a consistent correlation between crime victimization and increased political participation, measured using several different indicators. Strikingly, the positive correlation exists across different kinds of crimes, from petty to severe, and for almost every kind of participation. Looking at more severe victimization, such as wartime trauma, several authors have used a variety of techniques to attain plausibly exogenous exposure, and they have generally found that such trauma leads to greater likelihood of voting and civic engagement at the individual level (Bellows and Miguel 2009; Blattman 2009). The causal mechanisms attributed to these findings vary. In the violent conflict and war scenarios, some authors point to post-traumatic growth theory (Tedeshi and Calhoun 1996), a body of psychological work indicating that important (potentially positive) personality changes can result from terrible experiences. However, as Bateson (2012) notes, this sort of mechanism cannot account for her findings about crime, which indicate that even pickpocketing and bicycle theft can spur political participation—annoying events for sure, and even frightening, but generally not traumatic. Instead, she attributes her findings to emotional and expressive factors, citing accounts suggesting the benefits of participating for crime victims (Bejarano 2002; and Rozowsky 2002): “Crime victims may turn to politics because political participation mitigates the emotional consequences of victimization” (Bateson 2012: 571). 7 While certainly a plausible mechanism for her findings, the focus on emotions as a source of political participation opens up a broader question. If the political participation observed in response to victimization is being caused by anger at being a victim, or fear of being a victim again, should our main variable of interest be “anger” or “fear” instead of whether or not the 7 See also Rojo Mendoza (2014). person has been victimized? From this perspective, being a crime victim would be a source