Simulating the influence of terror management strategies on the voter ideological distance using agent-based modeling

Abstract

This paper simulates the effect of the strategies implemented by politicians after the terrorists attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004 on the ideological distance between voters and political parties. The attacks took place three days before the elections and changed the campaign’s agenda, which centered around the issue of who was responsible for the attack: ETA or Al Qaeda. It also altered the agenda of the mass media, which focused its informative activity on broadcasting news related to this issue. We did an exhaustive selection process of all the news broadcast on television, radio, and newspapers that made reference to the authorship of the attack. Using these messages we developed an agent-based model for explaining how the political strategies implemented by political parties influenced the ideological distance. The proposed model is based on the ideological proximity model by Downs (1957). After calibrating and validating the model with real data, we simulated the effect of three political strategies from the theory of terror management on the ideological distance between voters and political parties: the rally around the flag, the opinion leadership, and the priming of public opinion and media coverage. The results show that these strategies have a significant and stable impact on the ideological distance. In particular, the rally around the flag can have a lasting effect, capable of changing the ideological distance in the short term after a terrorist attack.