Does anxiety increase policy learning?

Abstract Does anxiety affect how public officials process policy information? It is often argued that the increasing number of policy failures can be explained by a lack of policy learning by decision makers. While previous studies show that socioeconomic and partisan variables are related to the perception of policy information, little attention has been paid to the role of emotions, such as anxiety, in the policymaking process. In this paper, we investigate the impact of anxiety on the policy learning of local office holders at the individual level in Switzerland. We introduce the Marcus' Affective Intelligence Model —which examines how emotions affect individuals' information processing—to the policy learning literature. To test the expectations of the model, we draw on novel experimental data collected among local elected officials from the 26 Swiss cantons. In the experiment, we randomly display anxiety‐inducing images along with policy information. We provide evidence that anxiety has a positive causal effect on learning. Considering potential moderators of this effect, we show that the relationship is not conditioned by the strength of priors or the perceived complexity of public policies. However, these variables are substantially correlated with policy learning. Our findings have important implications for better understanding how information influences policymaking.