Crime and politics copyright by Arthur Chambers Running for re-election can be hard on a politician. Care must be taken when choosing between issues to embrace and ignore. Commit to an unattainable goal, and chances of re-election can plummet. Luckily, human nature provides some tailor-made issues into which the politician can sink his or her teeth.
Crime is one such issue.
Due to people's use of the availability and representativeness heuristics in their judgments about crime, the politician would be able to speak to people's fears. This paper will introduce these heuristics, and then explore how the politician can manipulate them to produce a campaign platform that the public will value. The media's continuous coverage of violent crime assures that the public will be able to easily bring these extreme events to mind, and therefore to overestimate the prevalence of occurrence. Added to this misperception is the effect of the representativeness heuristic. However, lacking other sources of information, this over-coverage is assumed by many people to be representative of the amount of crime on the streets.