Is Fear Politics Enough? How the Emotional Economy of Fear and Hope Influences Voting Behaviour: The Case of Hungary and Georgia

How do incumbents in hybrid regimes secure electoral support despite economic and democratic decline? This paper argues that political elites increasingly rely on emotional appeals over policy performance, using fear politics to shape voter behaviour. Intensified by the war in Ukraine, this dynamic is particularly potent where geopolitical instability intersects with democratic decay, allowing incumbents in countries like Hungary and Georgia to sway voters through securitisation. They achieve this by framing the election as a binary choice, between war and peace in turn invoking the fear of conflict against the reassuring promise of stability. Using multinomial logistic regression and propensity score matching, I analysed how voter exposure to narratives of fear (threat of war) coupled with their perception of incumbents’ protective capacity influences political choice. The findings demonstrate that the ruling party's electoral support was firmly rooted within a strategically employed securitised discourse. Thereby, the analysis revealed that voter behaviour was not simply a reflection of pre-existing demographic loyalties but actively shaped by the interplay between a perceived existential threat and trust in the government's ability to guarantee stability. These findings suggest a shift in how electoral legitimacy is constructed in hybrid regimes: not through democratic or economic performance, instead through emotional control. The paper advances debates on political psychology, securitisation, and voting behaviour by revealing how the strategic combination of emotions are becoming a central tool of authoritarian leaning parties. The research contributes to literature on political psychology, securitisation, voting behaviour in Eastern Europe by offering a theoretical model in which fear alone is not the strongest force to mobilise voters; it is stronger when paired with hope.