We conduct an empirical analysis of data relating measures of economic and political freedom to the occurrence of transnational terrorism 1996–2002. We use binary logistical regression models to predict the probablities that a country will experience transnational terrorist attacks and that a given terrorist originates in a particular country. We find that the extent of political rights and civil liberties is negatively related with the generation of transnational terrorists from a country, but where the former is also negatively related with the occurrence of transnational terrorism in a country, the latter exhibits a non-linear relationship. A number of alternative explanations are disconfirmed: transnational terrorism is unrelated to inequality, economic growth, education, poverty, etc., while a society's fractionalization has mixed importance, and the religious composition has no or little association with attracting or producing transnational terrorism. A more trade-oriented economy seems consistently to associate with smaller probabilities of a country experiencing and generating transnational terrorism. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006Bush doctrine, Democracy, Freedom, Rent-seeking, Transnational terrorism,

In this paper we examine how individual predispositions in terms of the Big Five personality traits affect attitudes toward immigration. This allows us go beyond the assumption that individuals react to situational factors in a uniform way, which underlies established theories of attitudes toward immigration focusing mainly on economic and cultural threat. Adding personality traits to the explanation of attitudes toward immigration allows us to develop a more full understanding of attitude formation beyond situational factors as well as more insight into how individuals react differently based on their personality when confronted with the same situational triggers. We examined the question of how personality influence attitudes toward immigration using a Danish survey experiment and show that personality traits display direct as well as conditional effects on opposition towards immigration. As expected, we find that that Openness and Agreeableness have strong effects on attitudes toward immigration; individuals scoring high on these two traits are significantly more willing to admit immigrants compared to individuals scoring lower on the traits. We also find evidence that individuals react differently to economic threat depending on their score on the trait Conscientiousness; individuals scoring high on Conscientiousness have a greater tendency to oppose low-skilled immigration than individual scoring lower on this trait. This result implies that the influence of situational factors may critically depend on personality traits. More generally, the results suggest that the literature on political attitude formation may benefit from including more differentiated models of man.2

Recent studies have shown that variation in political attitudes and participation can be attributed to both genes and the environment. This finding raises the question of why genes matter to participation, and by which pathways. Two hypotheses suggest that feelings of civic duty and sense of political efficacy intermediate the relationship between genes and political participation and, thus, that these traits have a common heritable component. If so, how robust are the relationships across cultural contexts? Utilizing two new twin studies on political traits, one in Denmark and one in the United States, we show that the heritability of political participation and political efficacy is remarkably similar across cultures. Moreover, most of the covariation between efficacy and political participation is accounted for by a common underlying genetic component.

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This article examines the foundations of democratic citizenship along three dimensions: generalised trust in other people; norms of citizenship; and participation in organisations. Contrary to previous research, which mainly focuses on situational factors, this article scrutinises how individual predispositions, in terms of personality traits, influence the three dimensions of democratic citizenship. In accordance with recent research, personality is conceptualised according to the Big Five personality model encompassing the five traits Openness (to experience), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Based on a nationally representative Danish survey, which includes a 60-item Big Five personality inventory, we show that personality traits to a considerable extent influence all three dimensions of democratic citizenship. Furthermore, for norms of citizenship and organisational involvement, the personality traits have differential impacts contingent on the norm and type of organisational involvement in question.