Did politically engaged individuals construe the COVID-19 pandemic primarily as a security threat, a welfare threat, or both? Understanding differential emotional and ideological responses to threats through the lens of THEISM.

Political engagement shapes whether threats produce rigid or flexible political attitudes, yet the conditions under which these patterns emerge remain unclear. To address this gap, we introduced and tested the Threat-Engagement Ideological Shift Model (THEISM), which proposes that engagement determines whether threats are processed reactively-through a dominant security or welfare lens, yielding univalent emotions and rigid attitudes, or integratively, through multiple lenses producing conflicting multivalent emotions and flexible attitudes. Across four studies (N = 74,443) examining responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, results revealed that the pandemic was directly linked with liberal attitudes, with stronger effects among highly (vs. less) engaged individuals. At the same time, across both groups, perceived threat predicted both fear and empathy, leading to co-occurring conservative and liberal attitudes, respectively, reflecting integrative processing and shared pandemic responses. However, empathy-mediated liberal attitudes were stronger among highly engaged individuals, whereas fear-mediated conservative attitudes remained stable across groups, revealing engagement-based (a)symmetries. Overall, political engagement primarily strengthened the direct threat-liberalism pathway, with emotional pathways playing a more modest but theoretically meaningful role. The findings highlight how engagement conditions the translation of threats into emotional and ideological outcomes, helping clarify conditions under which threats produce shared or polarized attitudes.