The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes

Shana Kushner Gadarian

University of California-Berkeley

In this paper, I argue that the features of the media environment after 9/11, particularly the medias emphasis on threatening information and evocative imagery, increased the publics probability of supporting the policies advocated by political leaders, principally the president. Using the National Election Studies 20002004 panel and a controlled, randomized experiment, I demonstrate that citizens form signicantly different foreign policy views when the information environment is emotionally powerful than when it is free of emotion, even when the factual information is exactly the same. Citizens concerned about terrorism are more likely to adopt the hawkish foreign policy views communicated in threatening news stories when that policy is matched with fear-inducing cues than when it is not. These ndings suggest that the role of the media is broader than simply providing a conduit for elites to speak to the public; the media inuences the public through their own means as well.

errorism shattered Americas sense of invulnerability and unparalleled might on a sunny September morning. Almost overnight, the American landscape went from one of prosperity, safety, and power to one of threat, fear, and uncertainty. Threat and fear are not simply psychological phenomenathey are politically consequential for how elites and the mass media communicate with the public and, ultimately, for opinion formation. In times of crisis, citizens turn to political leaders and the media to make sense of new and frightening events. The contours of the information environment in turn inuence how people prefer the government to react to threat. In this paper, I argue that the features of the media after 9/11, particularly the medias emphasis on threatening information and evocative imagery, increased the publics probability of supporting the hawkish policies advocated by political leaders, principally the president. To the extent that the media reinforces feelings of threat and political elites advocate a dominant set of policies, the public is apt to support those policies. While terrorism is inherently dramatic and threatening (Gans 1979), in a competitive media environment, journalists and editors have incentives to use emotionally powerful visuals and storylines to gain and maintain ever-shrinking news audiences, and these elements of news coverage can strengthen the publics sense of threat. Using an analysis of the

National Election Studies (NES) 200020022004 panel and a controlled, randomized media experiment, I demonstrate that citizens form signicantly different foreign policy views when the information environment emphasizes emotion than when it is free of emotion, even when factual information is identical. Citizens concerned about terrorism are more likely to adopt the hawkish foreign policy views communicated in threatening news stories when they are matched with fear-inducing cues than when they are not. When people concerned about terrorism hear that a terrorist attack is likely and will bring re and destruction worse than 9/11, they adopt hawkish policies. When these people actually see the re, they react even more strongly. Unlike other models of public opinion (Berinsky 2009; Zaller 1992), my Threat Model contends that the mass media inuence foreign policy opinion through not only providing information, that is, communicating a set of policy options from political leaders, but also through covering threatening issues such as terrorism in an evocative way. In other models, the media function mostly as a conduit for elite cues; the distribution of elites supporting each position tells citizens how to align their own views to policies (Berinsky 2009; Zaller 1992) or an interaction of the cues and the credibility of the cue shape opinion (Baum and Groeling 2010). My model, however, argues that although the media inuence
doi:10.1017/S0022381609990910 ISSN 0022-3816

The Journal of Politics, Vol. 72, No. 2, April 2010, Pp. 469483 Southern Political Science Association, 2010

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470 citizens through providing foreign policy cues, the media also affect attitudes in their own right through evoking emotion. This theory takes information seriously, but it also explicitly considers the ways in which the mass media can inuence opinions through the tone and presentation of information.1 Theories of the medias inuence that focus on policy content but ignore the often threatening nature of news coverage are likely to underestimate the medias effect on the public. Since the media tend to cover foreign policy in threatening ways (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon, and Shapiro 2007), it is particularly important to account for how the emotional aspects of media coverage may increase persuasion and shape the publics policy preferences. When the news media emphasize threat with emotional cues, those cues inuence American foreign policy attitudes. Threat and the anxiety that accompanies feelings of risk increase support for strong political leaders as well as support for punitive policies that tend to escalate conict (Gordon and Arian 2001; Landau et al. 2004). Fear leads individuals to search for information, and leads to less reliance on long-standing political predispositions such as partisanship, increasing the potential for persuasion (Brader 2006; Marcus Neuman, and Mackuen 2000). If political leaders evoke fear in the public through the media without being challenged by political opponents, citizens attitudes are likely to be inuenced by the foreign policy choices presented by the most prominent political leader, most likely, the president. In considering how psychological mechanisms as well as the information environment inuence foreign
1 The Threat Theorys emphasis on threat and emotion does not imply that I believe threat is the predominant determinant of foreign policy attitudes or that predispositions such as partisanship and ideology are irrelevant to opinion formation. While partisanship and ideology may be less helpful cues in foreign policy than domestic policy, foreign policy opinion in the post-9/11 era is signicantly affected by partisanship, elite positions on foreign policy, and beliefs about information credibility. The Threat Theory argues that terrorism stories moved the public toward hawkish policy because the presidential administration effectively framed hawkish policy as the remedy for terrorism and that that link between terrorism and policy is strongest when connected to emotionally evocative images. Even as views on the War on Terror became more polarized by party, emotionally charged news could have inuenced attitudes by increasing support for the policies advocated by ones favored elite or for the dominant hawkish policy if no strong alternatives were offered by elites outside the presidential administration. Emotion may be most powerful in a one-message political environment, yet it does not preclude the possibility that other political actors can harness emotions to argue for alternative policies or the possibility that the emotion may be so powerful as to persuade citizens to permanently shift their attitudes. The moderating effects of partisanship on foreign policy attitudes are explored further in Gadarian (2008).

shana kushner gadarian policy attitudes, my Threat Model differs from previous work on foreign policy attitudes and provides a unique contribution to the study of public opinion. Huddy and colleagues (2002; 2003; 2005) work on support for counterterrorism policies argues effectively that perceptions of national threat increase support for hawkish policy. However, in my experiment described below, the design pushes these ndings further by demonstrating that emotion rather than information leads public opinion in a more hawkish direction in a way that Huddy et al, cannot since the authors did not manipulate threatening news coverage experimentally. Merolla and Zechmeister (2009) demonstrate that increased support for militant policies in times of threat is not limited to the American political context. They use media stories to experimentally induce threat in both Mexican and American samples, but they do not manipulate the emotional content independently of the threatening information as my experiment does. As such, I am able to show that emotional cues rather than threatening information alone inuence attitudes. The rest of this section outlines the components of my Threat Model: rst, the psychology of threat, second, how the political environment inuences attitudes, and third, the information environments role in spreading and reecting threat.

Fear itself -- The psychological underpinnings of foreign policy attitudes

In my Threat Model, individuals receive information about foreign policy primarily through the mass media, which disproportionately focus on threat and cover terrorism in sensationalistic ways (Iyengar 1991; Nacos, Bloch-Elkon, and Shapiro 2007). Additionally, in threatening times, the political spectrum tends to conform to a one-message environment where opposition to the presidents foreign policy lessens and, in turn, the media reects one particular message about the appropriate foreign policy approach (Zaller 1992). The War on Terror news frame that emerged after 9/11 argued, in line with the presidents positions, that a military solution was necessary to counteract terrorism and this frame received little serious opposition from Democratic leaders or the press (Entman 2003). Individual perceptions of threat lead citizens to support policies that they believe will neutralize the source of threat and protect them (Gordon and Arian

the politics of threat 2001). The presence of threat is associated with in group solidarity (Turner et al. 1984), ethnocentrism (Feldman and Stenner 1997), an increased reliance on enemy images (Hermann 1986), and decreased support for civil liberties (Davis and Silver 2004). In foreign policy, the threat of terrorism is associated with increased support for retaliatory action by the government (Huddy et al. 2002), greater support for overseas involvement (Merolla and Zechmeister 2009), and support for George W. Bush (Huddy et al. 2003; Landau et al 2004). In sum, threat is related to a range of shifts toward more punitive preferences and behavior. Therefore, I expect that individuals who perceive more threat from terrorism will support more hawkish foreign policy. Conversely, heightened threat will decrease support for dovish foreign policy.

471 hawkish frames generally dominated news coverage of the War on Terror, the coverage did not have a complete lack of opposition. Guardino and Hayes (forthcoming) found that the national network news featured sources opposed to the Iraq war, but those opposition voices came mostly from overseas whereas the promilitary arguments came mostly from ofcial sources. So while dovish viewpoints were available to the public, they came from less credible sources, suggesting a legitimization of hawkish views. Additionally, the imagery in terrorism stories supported the foreign policy recommendations favored by the president (Entman 2003). Grifn (2004) found that photographs in Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report after 9/11 depicted the events in ways congruent with the presidents War on Terrorism frame.

Media and foreign policy attitudes

The news media play a key role in shaping public opinion about the fundamental issues facing the nation. Particularly in foreign affairs, where complicated issues as well as low knowledge challenge the publics ability to form attitudes, the media can affect opinion (Baum 2003; Berinsky 2009). Yet, until recently, the medias role in forming foreign policy preferences was mostly ignored in the literature on how people form attitudes about war and conict (Hurwitz and Pefey 1987; Mueller 1973). Terrorism can inuence the public by having a venue via the mainstream media (Norris, Kern, and Just 2003) and also through the way that terrorism stories are presented to the public. Terrorism is newsworthy given its dramatic nature and receives inordinate coverage on the national news. Even before the recent focus on terrorism, terrorism news predominated over other types of potentially threatening news. Iyengar (1991) found that ABC, NBC, and CBS broadcast more stories on hijackings in the 1980s than on poverty, unemployment, race, and crime combined. Terrorism receives a considerable amount of coverage, and the coverage itself tends toward sensationalism (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon, and Shapiro 2007). George W. Bushs framing of the 9/11 attacks as the commencement of a global war against terrorism was not signicantly challenged by Democratic leaders or the press for some time after 9/11 (Entman 2003). For example, in New York Times coverage from 2001 to 2005, more than 70% of stories that utilized a terrorism frame took a promilitary engagement/ hawkish tone (Boydstun and Glazier 2008). Although

The role of visual imagery in how the media affects attitudes

In the Threat Theory, the media act not only to provide the public with cues about elites foreign policy positions but also to impart emotional emphasis to foreign policy and terrorism stories, primarily through the images accompanying news stories. Visual imagery may powerfully arouse emotions and inuence attitudes independently of news story messages (Brader 2006). Visual information, particularly negative imagery, captures viewers attention and interest, is easier to understand than verbal information, and makes retrieving information easier (Neuman, Just, and Crigler 1992; Newhagen and Reeves 1992). Negative visuals like those in terrorism stories are likely to induce emotion since they evoke a fear of death (Landau et al. 2004) and remind viewers of their traumatic emotional experience on 9/11. Surveys of Americans immediately after 9/11 showed a strong connection between media exposure to the attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder (Schuster et al 2001). The more television coverage people watched on 9/11 and afterward, the more severe their stress responses, especially among people who saw vivid images of the attacks.

How threat and media interact

The interaction of threat and media on foreign policy opinion is rarely explored in the media and public opinion literatures. Notable exceptions are studies by Huddy et al. (2003), Hermann (1986), and Merolla and Zechmeister (2009). Collectively, these studies nd

472 that threatening information and images increase support for hawkish foreign policy while reassuring information causes liberalization on defense issues. Yet none of this work asks whether, at a given level of threat, different media messages with varying levels of emotion inuence attitudes differently. The perception of threat after 9/11 was compounded by media coverage that portrayed vivid and unceasing depictions of death and destruction (Landau et al. 2004), meaning that the effect of threat may be conditional on media consumption. Druckman and McDermott (2008) found that distress increases framing effects, suggesting that individuals concerned about terrorism may be more open to persuasion and the messages offered about foreign policy through the mass media. Thus, the inuence of threat on opinion may depend on exposure to coverage of terrorist acts or threats. In other words, threat should have a larger inuence on attitudes for those people exposed to fearinducing media stories. If this is true, then we should expect the interaction of perceived threat and exposure to emotionally threatening media content to predict hawkish opinion. That is, increased media consumption in combination with heightened threat will increase support for hawkish foreign policy. However, this relationship exists primarily when media content provides emotional coverage of threat.

shana kushner gadarian handling of terrorism, spending on foreign aid (reversecoded), defense, border security, and homeland security (Cronbachs a 5 .62).2 The index represents the range of policies that the United States could use to ght terrorismfrom diplomacy and aid (dovish) to military action (hawkish). The spending questions asked respondents whether the federal budget should be increased, decreased, or remain the same. The index ranges from 21 to 1 and is constructed so that higher values signify more hawkish attitudes. While some policies, such as homeland security spending, were relatively uncontroversial, it should be noted that in 2002, support for policies such as war in Iraq represented the far end of the hawkish spectrum. I model the effect of threat perception, television news consumption, newspaper reading, and the interactions of threat and television and threat and newspaper, controlling for ideology and partisanship, in two waysusing OLS and two-staged least squares (2SLS). Since my major interest is modeling the inuence of threat and media exposure on attitudes, it is important to take into account the potentially cyclical relationship between threat and media exposure. Media exposure is potentially both a cause and a result of threat perception. People who feel threatened by terrorism might watch more TV news to cope with their anxiety about terrorism, but that information might increase threat perception, leading to more TV news watching, in a mutually reinforcing cycle. Ignoring endogeneity may lead to biased coefcients and high variance estimates in linear regression, leading to incorrect inferences (Achen 1986). Given these potential drawbacks, I model the relationship between threat and foreign policy attitudes using 2SLS as well as OLS. In the OLS models, ideology and partisanship are measured in 2000 while television watching, newspaper reading, and threat perception are measured in 2002.3 All independent
2 The online appendix http://rwj.berkeley.edu/scholars/gadarian.php includes question wordings and codings. This foreign policy index captures a broad foreign policy dimension of how respondents want the government to handle international problems: through diplomacy or the military. Using factor analysis with varimax rotation, the 6 items loaded strongly on one dimension (Eigenvalue 5 1.37). The 2002 index correlates with a 7-point diplomacy-militarism scale from the 2004 NES wave (r5.36, p , .01) and the same index measured in 2004 correlates with the 2004 diplomacy-militarism scale (r 557, p , .01). 3 Conservative and Republican identication both increased in the NES panel between the 2000 and 2002 survey waves as did support for hawkish foreign policy. To control for the possibility that respondents updated their partisanship and ideology to remain consistent with their foreign policy preferences, the models use respondents partisanship and ideology measured in the 2000 wave rather than the 2002 measure.

Testing the Threat Theory 2002

From my Threat Theory, I expect that individuals who perceive high threat from terrorism will support the most hawkish policies. In addition, I expect that individuals exposed to frightening media coverage of foreign policy will be the most likely to support hawkish policy. The Threat Theory implies that one of the major ways that the media can inuence attitudes is by enhancing feelings of fear and vulnerability. I use television versus newspaper consumption as distinct measures of more emotional and less emotional media exposure to test the implication that emotion, not just information, moves foreign policy attitudes. I utilize the 200020022004 NES panel to model the effect of threat, television news, and newspaper consumption on an additive index of foreign policy attitudes from 2002. The panel allows me to look at the same people before and after 9/11 and to demonstrate that the type of media exposure signicantly affected policy attitudes. The policy index contains six items weighted equally: approval of going to war in Iraq, approval of Bushs

the politics of threat variables are scaled to range between 0 and 1 with higher values indicating more newspaper reading, television watching, and threat perception. Higher values on the ideology and partisanship measures indicate more conservative and Republican views. In the 2SLS models, I instrument television watching and newspaper reading and their interactions with measures from the 2000 wave and include the 2000 ideology, partisanship, and 2002 threat measures.4 If the media inuence attitudes through providing threatening information, then I expect newspaper reading to affect attitudes; however, if the media inuence attitudes through heightening the effect of emotion rather than simply providing information, then television news exposure should have a larger effect than newspaper reading. News consumption is measured by two variables that capture media exposure: the average number of days in the past week the respondent watched national and local television news and the number of days in the last week respondents read a daily newspaper. Newspaper reading remained steady between the 2000 and 2002 panel waves while television watching increased signicantly. On average, in 2000, respondents read a newspaper 3.44 days a week, with 25% of respondents not reading a newspaper at all. In 2002, 21% of respondents read no newspaper in the past week and the average respondent read a newspaper 3.67 days per week. In comparison, television news consumption increased from 3.12 days in 2000 to 3.75 days in 2002 (p , .01).5
The panel structure is useful for nding instruments for the media exposure variable in 2002 because respondents answered the same media questions in 2000. The television questions asked respondents how many days in the last week they watched local and national television. In order to get a purged measure of TV watching in 2002, I regressed the average of respondents national and local news watching in 2002 on respondents average television watching in 2000, race, age, education, political sophistication, partisanship, ideology, marital status, and whether they lived in the West. I then use the predicted measure of TV watching in the second stage equations. Finding a useful instrument for threat perception is much more difcult since the 2000 NES did not ask about the threat of terrorist attacks. Threat perception may be closely related to individual personality dispositions such as trait-anxiety, for which there are few good measures on the NES. The lack of appropriate prior measures inhibits my ability to nd appropriate instruments. While ignoring endogeneity may wreak havoc on statistical estimations, using weak instruments may also seriously bias statistical inferences (Bartels 1991). Because I doubt the appropriateness of any instrument for threat perception, I include the original 2002 threat measure in all of the models in Table 1. Media exposure self-reports may be problematic because individuals have trouble estimating their own exposure (Prior 2009). Yet, these models are concerned with whether media consumption increases or decreases rather than with the actual number of days respondents watch/read. Additionally, the experiment later in the argument controls exposure rather than relying on self-reports.
5 4

473 Almost a year after the terrorist attacks, American citizens were still quite concerned about future terrorism. I operationalized threat perception as respondents belief about the likelihood of another terrorist attack, on a 4-point scale ranging from very unlikely to very likely. Forty-eight percent of the 1,100 respondents in 2002 thought that another major terrorist attack was likely in the next year, while another 19% believed that a terrorist attack was very likely, leaving one-third of respondents less concerned about terrorism. Only 8% of respondents answered that terrorism was very unlikely in the next year. This level of concern over foreign affairs was high in comparison to respondents level of worry in 2000. There were no questions about terrorism in 2000, but the NES did ask respondents in 2000 and 2002 how worried they were over the prospect of both conventional and nuclear war. Concern over both types of war increased substantially over time.6 One of the main ndings of these models is that television news signicantly increased support for hawkish policies whereas newspaper reading did not, suggesting that emotional coverage mattered more than information on its own. However, television news watching did not signicantly affect attitudes in the absence of threat perception. The left side of Table 1 displays the results of the OLS models. Respondents concerned about future terrorism reacted to threatening news by increasing hawkishness while the one-third of respondents unconcerned by terrorism were unmoved by television news. The effect of television exposure ranges from 2.03, when a respondent believed that terrorism was very unlikely in the next year, to .18 at the highest level of threat. Figure 1 presents the expected hawkishness scores for a respondent at varying levels of threat and television watching, holding partisanship, ideology, and newspaper reading at their means. The gure demonstrates that: (1) as respondents believed that terrorism was more likely, they preferred more hawkish types of foreign policy, and (2) television watching increased hawkishness among those concerned about terrorism. The lower line displays the effect of television watching on attitudes for respondents at the lowest level of threat; the atness of the line demonstrates that citizens unconcerned about a
In 2000, 50 percent of respondents answered that they were somewhat or very concerned about the prospect of conventional war, which increased to 84 percent by 2002 (x2 5 31.8, p , .01). Similarly, anxiety over nuclear war increased over time, in 2000, 43 percent of respondents were either somewhat (35 percent) or very worried (8 percent), while in 2002, 75 percent of the same respondents were somewhat (50 percent) or very worried (25 percent) (x2 5 92.8, p , .01).
6

474 T ABLE 1

shana kushner gadarian The effect of threat and media consumption on foreign policy attitudes 2002
Foreign policy index 2002 OLS Television model Newspaper model 0.20 (0.030) 0.15 (0.027) 0.14 (0.046) All media 0.22 (0.030) 0.14 (0.027) 0.01 (0.061) 20.03 (0.060) 0.22 (0.084) 0.01 (0.048) 20.03 (0.069) 0.36 (0.044) 1157 0.15 Television model 0.18 (0.035) 0.16 (0.028) 0.10 (0.030) 20.50 (0.184) 0.83 (0.239) 20.36 (0.16) 0.60 (0.25) 0.34 (0.030) 1058 0.15 2SLS Newspaper model 0.22 (0.032) 0.14 (0.028) 0.12 (0.030) All media 0.18 (0.038) 0.16 (0.029) 0.10 (0.030) 20.53 (0.210) 0.89 (0.292) 20.06 (0.20) 20.13 (0.330) 0.35 (0.041) 1046 0.16

PID 2000 Ideology 2000 Threat of Terrorism 2002 TV watching 2002 TV * Threat Newspaper reading 2002 Newspaper * Threat Constant Observations R2

0.22 (0.030) 0.14 (0.027) 20.01 (0.053) 20.03 (0.059) 0.22 (0.083)

0.03 (0.048) 20.02 (0.070) 0.33 (0.035) 1163 0.13

0.37 (0.038) 1158 0.15

0.34 (0.040) 1047 0.16

Source: NES 2000-2004 panel. Model Specication: OLS and 2SLS. Coefcients in bold are signicant at p , .05. Standard errors are in parentheses. Foreign policy index is a 6-item additive index spending on foreign aid, defense, border security, and homeland security/ war on terror, support for the war in Iraq, approval of the presidents handling of terrorism. The index ranges from 21 to 1, higher values are more hawkish. Partisanship and ideology are measured in 2000 and range from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating Republican and conservative. Television and newspaper consumption are measured in 2002 as the number of days a week respondents watched TV news/read a daily newspaper, recoded to range between 0 and 1 in the OLS models. Television and newspaper consumption in the 2SLS models are instrumented from TV watching and newspaper reading in 2000 and their interactions are instrumented as well. (See footnote 4 for details) Threat perception is respondents belief about the likelihood of another terrorist attack ranging from terrorism not very likely (0) to terrorism very likely (1).

terrorist attack were unaffected by television news exposure. In contrast, respondents at the highest level of threat were more responsive to media messages, as demonstrated by the steeper top line of Figure 1. As they were exposed to more television news, highthreat respondents increased their hawkishness from .55 to .75, moving toward the top of the hawkishness scale. This increase in support for hawkish policies had a substantively important effect on future political preferences. For a moderate, Independent respondent, increasing hawkishness from .55 to .75 in 2002 translated into an increased probability of supporting George W. Bush in the 2004 election by 14 percentage points.7
7 These calculations are based on a model that using the NES 2000-2004 panel to predict the probability that a respondent would vote for George W. Bush in the 2004 election based on respondents partisanship, ideology, gender, race (all measured in the 2000 wave) and 2002 hawkishness (measured with the foreign policy index). I then calculated a white, male respondents probability of voting for Bush when ideology and partisanship were held at their 2000 mean (moderate Independent). When hawkishness increases from .55 to .75, the respondent goes from being indifferent between Kerry and Bush (49 percent probability of voting for Bush) to being a strong Bush supporter (63 percent probability of voting for Bush).

Unlike television exposure, newspaper reading had no signicant effect on foreign policy attitudes either on its own or when controlling for television exposure. Newspaper readers are more able to tailor the information that they are exposed toindividuals not worried about terrorism may simply have chosen to avoid terrorism stories or avoid the most threatening aspects of stories and therefore the threatening information did not inuence their attitudes. Alternatively, low threat and high threat respondents may simply watch different news altogether, which is not possible to ascertain using this measure of media use. Yet the differences between newspaper reading and television exposure may also be due to the more emotional nature of television newstelevision stories allow individuals to visualize terrorism. Table 1 also displays results from 2SLS models regressing foreign policy attitudes on respondent threat perception and exogenous measures of media consumption in 2002. The right side of Figure 1 shows the predicted values of foreign policy holding newspaper reading, ideology, and partisanship at their means. The dependent variable is the same index as above. These 2SLS models reveal the same basic patterns as the OLS models with one signicant

the politics of threat F IGURE 1 Effect of threat and media use on foreign policy attitudes 2002
Foreign Policy Attitudes 2002
OLS model
.8 .8

475

IV model
High threat .7

High threat .7 .6

Hawkishness

Hawkishness

.5

Low threat .4

.5

.6

Low threat .4

.3

.2

No TV

Mean TV

Every day

.2
No TV

.3

Mean TV

Every day

TV watching per week

TV watching per week

Source: 2000-2004 NES Predicted values and 95% CI

difference. Consistent with the ndings from the previous models, respondents high in threat prefer signicantly more hawkish policy than those lower in threat. Unlike the OLS models, the 2SLS models show that newspaper reading may increase support for hawkish policies among high-threat citizens, although the effect of newspaper reading is signicantly attenuated when accounting for television watching, meaning that newspaper consumption does not have a direct effect on attitudesthe direct effect is carried only by the more emotive television content. This suggests that the threatening information captured in newspaper stories can inuence foreign policy attitudes but that emotive television coverage mattered more. These models suggest that television news, even very threatening news that catches viewers attention, may inuence viewers in a variety of waysconsumers threat perceptions inuence how they understand what they watch. High- and low-threat respondents take away different types of information and emotion from television coverage of foreign policy. Overall, both the OLS and the 2SLS models provide support for the hypothesis that an increased sense of vulnerability about terrorism led to more support for a variety of policies linked to the War on Terrormore defense and border spending, higher support for the Iraq war, and less support for dovish policies such as foreign aid. Additionally, the ndings show that television watching rather than newspaper reading moved foreign policy attitudes, suggesting that emotionally potent

coverage of terrorism inuenced attitudes more signicantly than information itself. Respondents threatened by terrorism were open to persuasion, and in the mostly one-sided political environment, these threatened individuals adopted the presidents position on foreign policy. Support for hawkish policy was especially high among people watching the nightly television news, news that ran hundreds of terrorism segments in the year after 9/11. Because the national news reected the presidents War on Terror framing (Entman 2003), respondents already concerned about terrorism received messages to help connect their sense of threat to hawkish policy options. Threat matters for political attitudes because the president and the media imbued the threat of terrorism with political meaning that citizens used to shape their attitudes. Television news, with its more emotional coverage of terrorism, mattered more for attitudes than did less evocative newspaper coverage, a dynamic explored in the next section.

The Threat Experiment

Utilizing the 2006 Threat Experiment, this section shows that when news stories pair threatening information with fear cues, threatened respondents are signicantly more likely to support militaristic foreign policy than respondents who only receive threatening information.

476 As shown in the previous section, threatened individuals exposed to the most television news adopted the most hawkish attitudes. However, the survey data cannot disentangle exactly why the television news exposure so effectively inuenced attitudeswhether the threatening information or the emotionally evocative presentation of the information increased support for hawkish policy. Using an experiment, this section further tests the hypothesis that television news stories increase support for hawkish policy through emotionally threatening cues. To test the effect of threatening media content on policy attitudes, I designed and ran the 2006 Threat Experiment, a media experiment with a nationally representative sample of 1,229 adults recruited through YouGov/Polimetrix. Because the experimental design required subjects to watch a news segment, the experiment took place online. Experiments provide a way to determine the causal impact of media exposure on attitudes in a way that secondary survey data cannot, making an experiment a better methodological choice. Using survey data alone, it is not possible to determine whether media cause feelings of threat, or whether preexisting feelings of threat determine attention to news and threatening information in particular. Additionally, media exposure self reports such as those used in the NES analysis are prone to overreporting because citizens have a difcult time estimating their news exposure (Prior 2009). Lastly, even with a perfect measure of media exposure, secondary data is unable to distinguish the effect of information from the effect of emotion. Given these issues, an experiment provides the advantage of control over both exposure and content. Respondents are randomly assigned to experimental conditions and exposed to the same information within each experimental condition, meaning that the selection mechanism for exposure is random rather than determined by subjects characteristics. The randomization enhances the ability to make inferences about how the media affect attitudes.

shana kushner gadarian female respondents, 80% white respondents, 23% with bachelors degrees or higher, and an average age of 46 years old. Participants answered a variety of attitude questions and were randomly assigned to watch one of three videos. In the control condition, participants watched an irrelevant news story on Indias economy that provided neither verbal information on threat nor a visual emotional cue to threat. Subjects in the two treatment conditions watched a story entitled Wave of Terror that outlined recent terrorist attacks and suggested that a terrorist attack was imminent. The experimental story suggested that, given the pattern of terrorist attacks in the past year, the public should expect further attacks and featured terrorism experts warning the public. All subjects in the treatment conditions received exactly the same verbal information about terrorismgovernment authorities were troubled by the increase in smaller-scale terrorist attacks like the ones in London and Madrid and the attacks might signal a new wave of terrorism. Only the visual imagery differed between the two treatment conditions: the scary visuals group viewed the terrorism story with evocative imagery of terrorism while the neutral visuals group viewed the same story with neutral imagery. Both terrorism stories highlighted the threat from terrorism, but the neutral visuals condition used a nonemotional tone and no visual imagery of terror. In the scary visuals treatment, the terrorism news story was edited to enhance the threatening nature of the visual imagery. This editing added video such as the burning World Trade Center and bloodied victims of the 2005 London transit bombings. In the neutral visuals condition, subjects watched the same story on terrorism with the visuals replaced by less violent imagery. For example, in place of the London victims, the neutral condition included maps of the London subway system. Table 2 summarizes the design of the experiment and the online appendix provides the text of the experimental treatments and compares the types of images seen in each treatment condition. The experimental design thus clearly teases apart the unique aspect of media coverage that my model predicts will affect attitudesthreatening visual cues that convey emotional contentfrom the unemotional information about the likelihood of a terrorist threat. To the extent that experimental respondents receive a threatening message about terrorism paired with emotional imagery, these respondents should be the most likely to support hawkish foreign policy. Across the conditions, the message about the increased likelihood of threat is the same while the emotional presentation differs, so any differences in opinion that

Experimental treatments
The experimental treatments manipulated both the presence of threat (threatening vs. nonthreatening verbal information) and the emotional cue (threatening visuals vs. nonthreatening visuals) in real television stories about recent terrorist attacks. The experiment took place online during fall 2006 with a representative sample of Americans. The sample is composed of 52%

the politics of threat T ABLE 2 The Threat Experiment Design (Color online)
Story watched Control condition Indian economy Story content NeutralThis is India booming. Visual content Neutral

477

Neutral visualscondition

Wave of Terror

ThreateningIs this the beginning of a wave of attacks?

Neutral

Scary visuals condition

Wave of Terror

ThreateningIs this the beginning of a wave of attacks?

Threatening

occur can be attributed to differences in the imagery/ emotion rather than to differences in the threatening information or other dimensions such as framing. If there are differences in opinion only between the control group and the treatment groups but not between the neutral visuals condition and the scary visuals condition, then threatening story content inuences opinions but how the content is presented does not. If there are differences between the neutral visuals condition and the scary visuals condition, then presentational factors like the visual content affect opinion. The Threat Experiment provides a hard test for pinning down the mechanism by which the media matter. The Wave of Terror story that respondents in the treatment conditions watched contained threatening information about potential terrorist attacks but did not contain overt policy content. The story itself did not advocate hawkish policies or quote sources arguing for more homeland security funding or sending more troops abroad. In addition, the experimental treatment consisted of only one, 2-minute story

about terrorism abroad in the midst of more than ve years and literally thousands of other news stories about terrorism. Even though respondents were asked their reactions and attitudes directly after the story, the treatment was relatively mild compared to the vast amount of relevant news available to Americans. To conrm that the scary visuals condition evoked respondents emotions as anticipated, this study used two manipulation checks to measure emotional reactions to the news stories. Prior to the Threat Experiment, all images were pretested by a separate sample of 79 students to conrm that the terrorism images provoked anxiety. Respondents viewed a series of both neutral and evocative photos in random order and answered how afraid, hopeful, and angry each photo made them, on a scale from 1 not at all to 10 very. On average, the neutral images evoked signicantly less fear than the terrorism images. For the seven neutral images the mean fear score was 1.60 while the average fear score for the terrorism pictures was 4.84 (p , .01). Respondents who saw a neutral image of a doubledecker London bus (Mbus 5 1.70) were signicantly

478 less fearful than those who saw the iconic image of the London bus attacked on July 7, 2005 (Mexplosion5 4.91, p , .01). As another measure, after watching the news story, each subject received a set of questions designed to tap into particular negative emotions; respondents rated how fearful (worried, fearful, anxious), sad (sad, depressed, grief stricken), and angry (angry, mad, and furious) they felt. Respondents rated their emotional reactions on a 9-point scale from did not feel the emotion at the low end to felt the emotion very strongly at the high end of the scale, which I rescaled to vary between 0 and 1. All of these negative emotions loaded strongly onto a single dimension in a factor analysis (Eigenvalue 5 2.00, Cronbachs a 5 .87). Respondents in the scary visuals condition felt signicantly more negative emotions (Msv 5 .43) than subjects in the control condition (Mc 5 .27, p , .01). Additionally, respondents concerned about terrorism prior to watching the terrorism story reported feeling signicantly more negative emotions in the scary visuals condition than either of the other two conditions (Mc5 .28, Mnv5 .48. Msv 5 .54, p , .02 both differences), suggesting that the visuals worked as intended.

shana kushner gadarian questions on their attitudes about specic military engagements in Sudan and Iraq. In 2002, Americans who perceived a high threat of terrorism were supportive of using the United States military to destroy terrorist groups in Sudan (Pew 2002). Respondents reaction to the Darfur region of Sudan provides a way to measure whether, given limited resources, citizens want the United States to spend funds for military or dovish means. The Sudan measure is a combination of two questions that asked respondents about hypothetical actions that the U.S. government could takemilitary action to destroy terrorist groups and sending humanitarian foreign aid to Darfur. Respondents gave their preferences toward military action and humanitarian relief separately using a 5point scale that ranged from strongly oppose to strongly favor, with neither favor nor oppose as the middle position. I created the Sudan measure by categorizing respondents who wanted to send aid but not troops as doves with a score of 0 and respondents who wanted to send troops but not aid as hawks with a score of 1.8 The Iraq measure asked respondents to evaluate retrospectively whether they believed that the war in Iraq was worth the cost and is scored on a 5-point scale from strongly disagree at 0 to 1 strongly agree. Lastly, the Government approval measure is a three-item index (Cronbachs a 5 .70) that asked respondents to evaluate how well they believed the government was doing in reducing the threat of terrorism, how much they approved of the presidents handling of terrorism, and whether they believed that the ability of terrorists to carry out terrorist attacks was greater, less, or the same than before 9/11. Higher scores indicated higher approval of the Bush administration and are categorized as being more hawkish. To test the hypothesis that high-threat respondents are especially likely to support hawkish policy when exposed to threatening news paired with fear cues, Figure 2 shows the differences in means between treatments and the 90% condence interval around the differences.9 This gure compares the treatment effects on all foreign policy measures for all respondents. The black circles represent the differences in attitudes between respondents in the neutral visuals condition and the control condition, and the white
8 Respondents who preferred a combination of dovish and hawkish action were excluded from this measure.

Threat and emotions effects on foreign policy attitudes

To establish that emotionally evocative media coverage increases support for hawkish policies, I measure respondents foreign policy attitudes by experimental condition using a set of ve dependent variables. All dependent variables were measured after exposure to the experimental treatments. The militarism measure asked respondents whether they thought that the best way to ensure peace was through military strength or diplomacy. The dichotomous measure is scored 0 for the diplomacy position and 1 for the military position. The spending index is a four-item index; each questions within the index asked respondents, Should the federal government should increase, decrease, or keep funding levels the same? on foreign aid, defense, border security, and homeland security. Each question weighed equally in the index (Cronbachs a5 .70), which was scaled from -1 (spend less) to 1 (spend more), and foreign aid was reverse coded. These measures are identical in wording to the measures from the NES utilized in the previous section. To test whether threat has broad consequences on foreign policy, respondents also answered several

Because the Threat Theory expects that evocative imagery should only move respondents toward the hawkish end of the scale, Figure 2 utilizes one-tailed signicance tests and shows 90 percent condence intervals.

the politics of threat F IGURE 2 Scary visuals condition increase hawkishness among high threat respondents
Foreign Policy Attitudes by Condition (Low threat subjects)
Militarism Militarism

479

Foreign Policy Attitudes by Condition (High threat subjects)

Foreign Policy Spending

Foreign Policy Spending

Sudan

Sudan

Approval of Handling of Terrorism

Diff(Neutral-Control) Diff(Scary-Neutral)

Approval of Handling of Terrorism

Diff(Neutral-Control) Diff(Scary-Neutral)

Iraq Worth Cost

-0.5 -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1

Iraq Worth Cost

-0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

Hawkishness

Hawkishness

open diamonds represent the differences in opinion between the scary visuals condition and the neutral visuals condition. Movements in a hawkish direction are shown to the right of the vertical dotted line while movements toward the dovish end appear to the left of the line. Respondents are divided by their pretest level of threat, measured as how likely the respondent believed a terrorist attack was in the next year. The 553 low-threat respondents believed that terrorism was (very) unlikely while the 674 high-threat respondents answered that terrorism was (very) likely. Consistent with the ndings from the NES, lowthreat subjects are unresponsive to both the message and the presentation of television news, with the exception of the decision to send troops versus aid to Sudan. While subjects unconcerned about terrorism are no more likely to support hawkish policy in the treatment conditions than in the control condition across four of the ve dependent variables, lowthreat subjects in the scary visuals condition actually adopt a more dovish position than respondents in the neutral visuals condition. While 26% of low-threat respondents in the neutral visuals condition preferred sending troops to ght terrorism in Sudan rather than send humanitarian aid, only 13% of those in the scary visuals condition did. This move toward dovishness suggests that the imagery associated with terrorism may not automatically be associated with hawkish policy outcomes. Terrorism in Sudan and the Darfur situation are not salient issues closely

associated with the War on Terror, meaning that the threatening imagery may easily sway respondent to support a variety of positions, including dovish ones. Among those individuals unconcerned about terrorism, neither the threatening information contained in the neutral visuals story nor the evocative imagery in the scary visuals story affected foreign policy attitudes for the majority of measures. Citizens often choose between not watching a terrorism story at all and seeing an evocative story highlighting death and destruction. The experiment allows a test of the effect of that choice on foreign policy attitudes by comparing the foreign policy views of high threat-respondents in the scary visuals condition to those in the control condition. Across all ve foreign policy measures, high-threat respondents in the scary visuals condition are about 6% more supportive of hawkish policy than high threat subjects in the control condition.10 To compare the magnitude of these effects, the largest effects of the scary visuals conditions are in the case of overall militarism (10 percentage points) and in willingness to bomb Sudan (9 percentage points). These effects are slightly less than the effect of being a Republican (14 percentage

Comparing the mean hawkishness score among high threat respondents in the control condition to high threat respondents in the scary visuals condition, the difference in means across the 5 dependent variables ranges in size from .03 to .10 on scales that range from 0 to 1, with the exception of the spending scale that ranges from 21 to 1.

10

480 points) and about a third of the size of voting for Bush in 2004 (34 percentage points) on respondents hawkishness in the 2004 NES. The experiment also allows for a tougher test of the hypothesis that the emotional nature of terrorism news increases support for militaristic policies. If threatening information about terrorism alone affected attitudes, then support for hawkish policies should be equal in the neutral visuals and scary visuals conditions. Figure 2 demonstrates though, that the scary visuals condition increased support for hawkish policies over the neutral visuals condition among high threat subjects. In contrast to low-threat respondents unmoved by either information or emotion, high-threat respondents react to the threatening information and emotional imagery in the scary visual condition by supporting increasingly more militant foreign policy. Compared to respondents who watched the Wave of Terrorism story without the emotional imagery, respondents in the scary visuals condition are more supportive of military solutions to international problems by .07 on the 0 to 1 scale (p , .08), prefer more spending on areas such as defense and border security by .09 (p , .02), rate the governments handling of terrorism more positively by .06 (p , .07), and a larger percentage of respondents prefer to send troops to Sudan rather than foreign aid by .11 (p , .06). High-threat subjects are more supportive of the Iraq war than low-threat subjects, but the experimental treatments failed to increase support for the war among those high in threat. Although not all of the differences between the neutral and scary visuals conditions are signicant at the conventional p , .05 level, the overall pattern of ndings demonstrates that threatening media content can increase hawkishness but that the most powerful effects from television news come from stories that utilize emotional presentations. These ndings demonstrate that watching one news story about potential terrorist attacks that included emotion-inducing imagery increased support for a variety of militaristic policies while the less emotional neutral visuals condition did not According to the hypotheses, I expect that terrorism stories signicantly affect attitudes because they evoke negative emotions like anxiety that make citizens more open to political persuasion. To more directly test whether the scary visuals condition affects attitudes through evoking respondents emotions, Figure 3 compares the mean levels of foreign policy attitudes among respondents who did not react emotionally to the scary visuals condition (low emotion) and those with stronger emotional reactions (high emotion) and 90%

shana kushner gadarian F IGURE 3 Emotion mediates the effect of the scary visuals condition

condence intervals around the means.11 As Figure 3 demonstrates, the scary visuals condition affected foreign policy attitudes through evoking emotion. Subjects who reacted emotionally preferred more militaristic policy overall (Mdifference 5 .41, t58.78, p , .01), supported more defense and border security spending (Mdifference 5 .36, t57.02, p , .01), evaluated the Bush administrations handling of terrorism more positively (Mdifference 5 .18, t54.51, p , .01), and were more supportive of the use of the military overseas in Sudan (Mdifference 5 .22, t56.31, p , .01), than respondents unemotional after watching the scary visuals condition. The size of the emotion effect is roughly equivalent to the difference between Democrats and Independents foreign policy views in this sample. The effect of emotion is to substantively increase support for a range of more militaristic policies that respondents do not prefer in the absence of emotion. The experiment demonstrates that more than ve years after the 9/11 attacks, exposure to a single terrorism story led high-threat respondents to prefer
The Emotion variable is constructed from respondents emotional reactions to the scary visuals condition that were described in the manipulation check section. Fear and anger scaled together on one dimension in a factor analysis, so I combined these two emotional responses into one emotion index and divided respondents by the median. Respondents were categorized as low emotion (n5514) if they were below the median on either the fear index or the anger index. Respondents were categorized as high emotion (n5715) if their scores on either the fear or anger indices was above the median or if they were above the median on both indices.
11

the politics of threat more hawkish types of foreign policy when the story presented both a threatening message and emotional presentation. What makes this nding especially striking is that, in the years since 9/11, American citizens saw frequent news stories about terrorism and had stored knowledge and beliefs about counterterrorism policy. Equally remarkable is the fact that, even though the public is both interested and knowledgeable about terrorism, watching one more frightening terrorism story signicantly inuenced attitudes of respondents concerned about terrorism more than ve years after 9/11.

481 ndings from this paper illustrate that the amount and type of information that citizens received from the media profoundly affected policy attitudes, conditional on individuals level of concern over terrorism. While the focus of this particular study is terrorism, the results hold implications for other policy domains. In policy areas where there are resonant images reected in mass media coverage that can induce negative emotions, these ndings suggest that elites have an opportunity to persuade citizens to support preferred policies, particularly punitive policies. In particular, past research demonstrates that perceptions of threat shape attitudes toward crime, immigration, and public health (Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008; Iyengar 1991; Witte and Allen 2000). What the Threat Theory can add to this research is an understanding of how mass media coverage of these issues may increase support for punitive/hawkish policiesthat is, through evoking emotion. Issues of war and peace are fundamental to democracy, and this paper reveals conditions under which the mass public will support the use of force. This paper lls a hole in the literature on public attitudes in times of crisis by demonstrating that public support for hawkish policy is not the only possible outcome after terrorist attacks, but under the conditions where the public feels threatened and the mass media covers terrorism in a sensationalistic manner, support for hawkish policy will increase. These ndings also suggest that the role of the media is broader than simply providing a conduit for elites to speak to the public; the media inuences the public through its own means as well. This article outlines how the media play a role in convincing some members of the public to support different policies than they otherwise might. While respondents high in threat adopted signicantly more hawkish attitudes after watching the scary visuals condition than the control condition, this article should also provided some relief to those concerned about the unchecked power of fear to adulterate the publics attitudes on foreign policy and war. Emotion did alter some respondents attitudes, but the largest effect was on individuals open to the threatening messages in the treatment conditions, suggesting that people can rely on certain mechanisms, such as diminishing the threat of terrorism, to cope with threatening news. Yet, if the media can activate citizens sense of impending danger, my ndings show that when political leaders trumpet the right threatening message and the mass media use the right images, the public may consent to war, even though a citizenry with less emotion may have chosen otherwise.

Conclusion
In times of crisis, citizens turn to the government and mass media for answers, comfort, and protection. In the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, millions of Americans turned on televisions in their homes, schools, and workplaces to make sense of events and to understand how they should react. But television heightened threat instead of providing comfort because it focused on threatening, emotionally laden images of terror. Television watchers saw the Twin Towers fall in New York City, saw crowds of ofce workers running away from the disaster as re ghters and police ran toward the collapsed buildings, and saw the desperate faces of bystanders. Bearing witness in this way led many Americans to feel profound emotionsanger at the hijackers, sadness over the loss of life, and fear of future attacks. The emotional cues in the media combined with the perception that another attack was likely shaped the types of policies that the public demanded to address terrorism in the aftermath of the attacks. In this article, I argue that evocative, emotionally powerful images of terrorism cued the public into supporting hawkish foreign policy in the years after 9/11. Using an experiment that tightly controlled the type of terrorism stories respondents saw, this article demonstrates that emotionally charged news inuences attitudes signicantly more than information on its own. However, not all citizens reacted to the information environment in the same way. Those individuals already concerned about future terrorism were especially supportive of hawkish policy when exposed to news coverage, particularly news coverage that was emotional in nature. Americans convinced that terrorism was likely in the future were responsive to the message and emotional content of terrorism news stories. The mass media covered the War on Terror heavily from the 9/11 attacks onward, and the

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shana kushner gadarian

Acknowledgments
This project was supported by a grant from Princeton Universitys Policy Research Institute for the Region. Thank you to Bethany Albertson, Matthew Baum, Larry Bartels, Ted Brader, Marty Gilens, Tali Mendelberg, and seminar participants at Princeton for comments on earlier drafts. Manuscript submitted 22 December 2008 Manuscript accepted for publication 30 August 2009

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Shana Kushner Gadarian is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy at University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.