Satisfied with pandemic democracy? Evaluating the role of anger and fear in times of threat

In order to overcome crises like the current coronavirus pandemic, it is vital that citizens have confidence in their political system. As of yet, however, there has been little research on how such external crises affect satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. We argue that negative emotions, which are highly prevalent during an ongoing crisis, play a key role in this regard. Drawing on the affective intelligence theory of emotions, anger and fear evoked by pandemic threat should have opposing effects on satisfaction with democracy. While fear leads respondents to rally behind the current system and its actors and thereby increases satisfaction, anger instead leads respondents to blame the system for the adverse consequences of the pandemic and thus decreases satisfaction with democracy. We test these arguments with a) original cross-sectional online survey data in six Western European countries at three points in time during the pandemic with over 18,000 observations, b) original panel data of over 4,000 respondents in six Western European countries as well as c) a pre-registered thought listing experiment including 1,000 respondents in Germany. The empirical evidence lends support to our arguments: While pandemic threat-induced anger displays a consistent negative relationship with satisfaction with democracy, fear is positively related to this kind of democratic support, albeit less consistently. In this respect, our study highlights that different emotional responses to threat have important political ramifications.