Yes, there is much evidence of fear as the principal response to threat with direct impact on decision making. There’s vast amount of literature about it, one thing I quickly found is a piece written by political scientist George Marcus, emeritus professor of political science at Williams College:

… increasing fear reduces the influence of otherwise salient political dispositions, and that fearful citizens will be less influenced by their partisan attachments or their ideological convictions.

There is a rich empirical literature that seems to confirm the conventional account that fear causes people to seek strong conservative leaders and to endorse authoritarian policies and parties.

An important piece of communication here is the creation of an enemy - the migrants, the refugees, the West, the Nato, … It works (and has been working) in all human societies.