People with anxious tendencies are more likely to support left-wing economic policy

New research provides insight into the psychological underpinnings of political ideology. The findings suggest that individuals who are prone to anxiety are more likely to support left-wing economic policies, particularly when they feel socially excluded. This tendency appears to stem from a deep-seated human need for community support during times of vulnerability. The study was published in the British Journal of Political Science.

Political scientists and psychologists have long sought to understand the relationship between personality traits and political beliefs. A common perspective in the field has historically suggested that right-wing beliefs serve as a coping mechanism for fearful or anxious people. Theories posited that conservative ideologies provided structure and certainty that appealed to those with sensitive dispositions.

However, recent data has complicated this picture. Surveys frequently show that people who identify as liberals or support left-wing parties report higher levels of distress and negative emotions than their conservative counterparts.

“There’s a very entrenched idea in my subfield (political psychology) that anxiety makes people more conservative/right-wing. The idea is that conservative ideas are more comforting than liberal ideas because they provide simple, neat answers to questions about life and society,” said study author Adam R. Panish, a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University.

“So if you’re psychologically predisposed to anxiety or are temporarily anxious, you’ll like conservative ideas more. This idea goes all the way back to the 1940s, when social scientists were trying to make sense of Nazism using Freud’s ideas about repression and anxiety. It’s still one of the first things that most students read about in political psychology courses.”

“But around 2010, political psychologists started publishing modern high quality data that showed the opposite — anxious people were scoring much higher on measures of left-wing attitudes, particularly economic attitudes. So I wanted to try to understand why we were seeing results that are the opposite of what longstanding theories would predict. At the same time, people on social media started talking about the rise of anxiety and depression among young liberals in 2022. So it seemed like a good time to take a closer look.”

The researchers proposed the “social support hypothesis.” This framework looks at political preferences through the lens of evolutionary psychology. For early humans, survival depended entirely on the support of the group. In a foraging environment, injury or illness could be fatal without the care and resource sharing of others. Consequently, the human mind likely evolved to perceive social exclusion as a severe threat to survival.

Modern individuals might interpret state-provided economic support as a contemporary equivalent of tribal care. If this is true, people who are sensitive to threats—specifically those with high anxiety—should gravitate toward policies that ensure material security when they feel their social safety net is lacking.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers utilized data from four large-scale, representative surveys. These included the American National Election Studies, the Cooperative Election Study, and The American Panel Survey from the United States, as well as the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences from the Netherlands. The combined dataset included responses from nearly 18,000 participants.

The researchers employed specific measures to isolate the relevant personality traits. While the broad trait of neuroticism encompasses various negative emotions, the researchers distinguished between two of its primary facets: anxiety and emotional volatility.

Anxiety refers to the tendency to feel vulnerable and worried in response to threats. Volatility refers to irritability and mood swings. The researchers anticipated that only anxiety would predict support for redistribution, as it is the facet connected to feelings of neediness and the desire for protection.

Economic attitudes were measured by asking participants about their support for various government interventions. These included increasing taxes on the wealthy, government spending on healthcare and unemployment, and federal job guarantees.

To measure social exclusion, the surveys asked respondents about the size of their support networks. For example, some questions asked if respondents had people they could rely on during a misfortune. Other measures looked at the number of friends participants had on social media platforms like Facebook.

The results from the survey data offered support for the social support hypothesis. Across all four datasets, higher levels of anxiety consistently predicted stronger support for left-wing economic policies. This relationship held true even when the researchers accounted for demographic factors such as age, sex, and education.

The analysis also confirmed that this effect was specific to anxiety. Emotional volatility did not show a consistent positive relationship with support for redistribution. This suggests that the political leaning is not simply a result of general negative emotionality but is tied specifically to the psychology of vulnerability.

“Our strongest finding is that being a generally anxious person is related to being economically left-wing in both the United States and the Netherlands,” Panish told PsyPost. “This relationship isn’t explained by people’s income, education, health insurance enrollment, homeownership, or employment status. It also isn’t explained by demographic characteristics like gender, race, or age.”

One of the most significant findings from the survey analysis involved the comparison between personality and financial status. Political economists often assume that personal financial circumstances are the primary drivers of views on redistribution. People with less money are expected to want more government help.

However, the researchers found that a person’s level of anxiety was a powerful predictor of their economic views. In fact, anxiety predicted support for redistribution roughly as well as income level did. It was a stronger predictor than other material factors, such as whether a person owned a home, had health insurance, or was currently unemployed.

“Depending on the survey, we found that the most anxious people scored between 0.26 and 0.68 standard deviations higher on scales measuring support for left-wing economic policies than the least anxious people,” Panish explained. “Because these effect sizes can be hard to make sense of in practical terms, we also checked how anxiety measured up against socioeconomic variables like income.”

“We found that anxiety predicted economic attitudes better than health insurance enrollment, homeownership, or employment status, and it was about tied with income. So if you imagine how important a person’s salary is for predicting their economic attitudes, our results show that anxiety is similarly important.”

The data further revealed that social context plays a regulating role in this relationship. Anxiety did not universally lead to left-wing economic preferences. The link was strongest among individuals who felt socially excluded.

In the Dutch sample, for instance, anxiety did not predict economic attitudes among people who felt they had a strong social safety net. However, among those who reported having few people to rely on, high anxiety was associated with a substantial shift toward the left.

A similar pattern emerged in the American data regarding social media connections. Among people with few Facebook friends, those with high anxiety were significantly more supportive of redistribution than those with low anxiety.

To move beyond correlations and test for a causal link, the researchers conducted two experiments using an online platform. These experiments involved 1,291 participants in the United States. The goal was to manipulate feelings of social exclusion in a controlled setting and observe the immediate effect on political attitudes.

Participants in the experiment were asked to create a personal profile for a supposedly interactive online discussion group. They uploaded a first name and wrote a short biography. They were then shown a series of other profiles, which were actually generated by the researchers. The participants could “like” the other profiles and see how many likes they received in return.

The researchers randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions. In the inclusion condition, participants received an average number of likes from the group. In the exclusion condition, participants received almost no likes, simulating social rejection.

Following this manipulation, participants answered questions about their political preferences. The policies in question mirrored those in the surveys, such as government-provided healthcare and job guarantees. The researchers also measured the participants’ baseline levels of anxiety before the manipulation took place.

The experimental results mirrored the survey findings. Among participants who were predisposed to anxiety, those who experienced rejection in the online task expressed higher support for social welfare policies. This shift occurred even though the rejection came from anonymous strangers on the internet who could not provide actual material support.

This supports the idea that the reaction is driven by an evolved psychological system that equates exclusion with a need for provisioning. The effect was not observed among anxious participants who were included, nor was it observed among participants with low levels of anxiety.

The researchers point out certain limitations to the study. While the link between anxiety and economic views was robust, the relationship between anxiety and social policies was less consistent. Anxious people did not uniformly lean left on issues like abortion or immigration.

“We make an attempt in the paper to explain why anxious people might be more economically left-wing,” Panish said. “We theorize that anxious people like the idea of government providing care and resources because they tend to feel vulnerable, and we test this indirectly by manipulating a stimulus that humans have evolved to associate with vulnerability — being socially excluded.”

“As predicted, we find that people with anxious personalities are especially likely to become more economically left-wing when they feel excluded. However, it is important to note that this dynamic may not explain all or even most of the relationship between anxiety and ideology. There is much more work to be done in this area.”

Future research could investigate how these personality dynamics play out in different political contexts or with different types of social threats. The researchers also suggest that understanding the evolutionary roots of personality can help explain other political behaviors.

“I am working on several follow-up studies to understand how anxiety shapes people’s political attitudes, some in collaboration with my co-author on this study, Andy Delton,” Panish said.

The study, “Why Anxious People Lean to the Left on Economic Policy: Personality, Social Exclusion, and Redistribution,” was authored by Adam R. Panish and Andrew W. Delton.