Costs, Inconvenience, or Civil Rights? Investigating Determinants of Public Support for Surveillance

Abstract

As a response to security threats, governments around the globe, albeit in different magnitude, have implemented measures of mass surveillance interfering with individual rights. Regardless of prominent (normative) debates on surveillance and security, studies examining individual attitudes and factors explaining them are relatively scarce. While people in general prefer living in a secure environment, I argue that it is not only the imminent trade-off between security concerns and protecting one’s privacy and freedom that ultimately persuades citizens to support surveillance measures. Based on results from a factorial survey experiment with 5,000 respondents, I demonstrate that German citizens are in general willing to accept the introduction of far-reaching surveillance measures, but related financial costs and individual convenience significantly influence such support. Context, in this case whether a security threat is salient, however, has no effect on individual support.