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Book Project
The Politics of Feeling Unsafe: How Emotions Shape Public Security Preferences
After Mexico launched its Drug War in 2006, successive governments promised that militarized crackdowns would restore peace and dismantle criminal groups. Yet nearly two decades later, violence remains stubbornly high, and citizens continue to live under constant threat. My book project builds on my dissertation to explain why punitive enforcement retains such broad appeal even when it fails to deliver safety.
I argue that understanding public security preferences requires shifting attention from perceptions of crime to the emotions they provoke. Many studies implicitly treat anger and fear as two sides of the same coin—assuming that anxiety about crime naturally spills into anger and outrage, which in turn hardens public frustration into demands for punitive, iron-fist crackdowns. Instead, the core claim of my dissertation is that anger and fear instill distinct cognitive and motivational biases that steer citizens down divergent policy paths. Anger, marked by blame and a sense of efficacy, converts indignation into support for hardline crackdowns. Fear, by contrast, heightens uncertainty and powerlessness, leading individuals to favor negotiated arrangements with criminal groups that exchange impunity for peace.
To demonstrate these dynamics, I employ a multi-method research strategy. I analyze a nationally representative mental-health survey and a panel of household medical outcomes spanning the period before and after the 2006 launch of Mexico’s Drug War. I also draw on fieldwork in Puebla, Mexico—a state experiencing a sharp surge in cartel violence. There, I ran a lab experiment to isolate the causal effects of anger versus fear and conducted focus groups to clarify mechanisms and context.
The Two Emotional Constituencies of Public Security Preferences
The onset of criminal violence can be profoundly distressing, but it does not affect everyone in the same way. This chapter asks which emotions violence activates among the public—and why—contrasting anger with fear. I argue that routine exposure to unpredictable, uncontrollable harm primarily elicits fear, whereas anger is less likely to arise absent clear media narratives or cues that assign blame and imply efficacy. I test this claim with two nationally representative datasets: (1) medical self-reports capturing anger and anxiety, and (2) a panel that tracks respondents’ emotional states before and after the 2007 launch of Mexico’s Drug War. Linking individuals to contemporaneous local violence, I find that increases in exposure consistently elevate fear and anxiety but do not systematically raise anger, with the strongest effects in communities bearing the brunt of violence. In short, fear emerges more spontaneously as the immediate affective response to ambient criminal violence, whereas anger is more contingent—typically requiring interpretive frames that specify blame and promise efficacy—setting up the downstream analyses of policy preferences in subsequent chapters.
Crackdowns or Conciliation? Emotions and Public Security Preferences in Mexico (JMP)
Perceptions of crime shape how citizens judge law enforcement and public security, but we know far less about how those perceptions become concrete policy preferences. This paper opens that black box by centering emotions—unpacking how people feel about crime. I argue that angry or outraged individuals favor punitive crackdowns, whereas fearful individuals are unnerved by escalation and instead prefer negotiated arrangements that trade enforcement leniency for peace. To test these claims, I field a lab experiment in Mexico that isolates the causal impact of anger versus fear on downstream preferences. The findings support these
expectations. Taken together, the results challenge the presumption that emotional distress inevitably hardens “iron-fist” demands: anger and fear, triggered by different cues, channel citizens toward starkly different security strategies.
Gun ownership
Gun ownership is quickly emerging as a salient wedge issue in Latin American politics. Mexico is no exception: despite having one of the strictest civilian firearms regimes in the world, rising crime and populist right-wing activism are eroding the country’s long-standing anti-gun consensus. I first draw on survey and focus-group evidence to probe the persistence of social resistance to liberalizing gun laws and to acquiring firearms for personal protection. I then field a lab experiment showing that an induced fear treatment increases individuals’ stated willingness to
acquire a firearm for self-defense. Crucially, the effect of fear is constrained to personal decisions: it does not translate into greater support for deregulating gun laws.
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