The COVID pandemic provided a totally undesired but nevertheless useful natural experiment about fear and politics. With good reason, people feared for their lives – and many still do. The level of fear varied from country to country but was arguably present to some degree everywhere. Governments had to react, and made widely varying responses. Some prioritised health, imposed and enforce lockdowns, and were quick to develop or place orders for vaccines. Others privileged the economy over public health and denied the severity of this new coronavirus and its likely consequences. Still others vacillated between these responses. What accounts for this variation? What were its medical and political consequences?

Other contributors explore pieces of the puzzle. I will briefly review some of the most relevant findings and use them as a conceptual and empirical introduction to the questions I pose above. I go on to explore the concept of fear and distinguish it from fright. Fear generates strong public demands for protection. This pressure can constrain or enable leaders depending on the circumstances, their capabilities, but above all, their framing of the problem. Leaders can try to arouse or dampen public fears and make different tradeoffs about health versus other goals. Rationalist accounts would explain these choices as reasoned responses to the constraints and opportunities leaders face. Contributors disagree, as do I. There is considerable evidence that leaders failed to gather or evaluate relevant information. They often acted irrationally, defined here as pursuing policies that were made with little consideration of – or in the face of – what evidence was at hand, and continued even after accumulating evidence indicated that they were not achieving their intended goals. To explain this behaviour I draw on motivational psychology and political ideology. My accounts are merely suggestive as they are not the result of data gathered from carefully paired and exhaustively researched cases. The editors offer a set of propositions in their introduction. I return to them in the conclusion and argue in favour of four of them.

The problem

Contributors on the whole address three important questions: the role of fear in politics, governmental responses to it, and their consequences. Their investigations mostly take the form of general surveys or case studies. Like my analysis, they are suggestive rather than definitive.