ABSTRACT
This chapter endeavours to compare and integrate competing perspectives and research on the impact of these existential threats, particularly those linked to the awareness of death. Regardless of whether they operate in tandem or independently, detrimental effects of terror management and system justification processes on the political landscape are palpable and numerous. Beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior are skewed by our insecurities and defensive ideological clinging, contradicting the rationalist principles of Jeffersonian democracy and undermining desperately needed efforts for humans to find common understanding before people bring about own extinction. Using diverse correlational survey techniques, McCann found the degree of social, economic, or political unrest perceived as threatening to the American way of life to predict greater state-level support for Republican candidates, but only in conservative states. An experiment testing how MS impacts political leanings may elicit different psychological processes and thus produce different psychological outcomes than a correlational test of the association between political ideology and self-reported death anxiety.
