How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta‐Analysis

Abstract

How does terrorism affect citizens’ political attitudes? Over the years, many scholars have tried to answer this question. This article performs a meta‐analysis on this literature, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents. The findings confirm that terrorism is associated—to a small but significant extent—with outgroup hostility, political conservatism and rally‐‘round‐the‐flag effects. At the same time, the effects of terrorism vary widely, with studies on Islamist violence, conducted in the United States or Israel, and using cross‐sectional data yielding stronger results on average. Finally, the review reveals remaining gaps in this field of study, including a lack of research on non‐Islamist violence or conducted in non‐Western contexts. Taken together, this meta‐analysis consolidates existing evidence, determines which results hold across contexts, and identifies key gaps in our current knowledge. Its data can also be accessed interactively via a Shiny App.

Does Political Trust Matter? A Meta-analysis on the Consequences of Trust

“…The average magnitude of the effect of trust on all outcomes in the dataset is 0.08 (CI = [0.06, 0.10]). To put these effect sizes into context, other meta-analyses in political science have found that terrorism has an effect of 0.09 on rally effects to 0.132 for a conservative shift (measured in Fisher's Z, the same unit as here) (Godefroidt, 2021); that ethnic diversity has an effect of -0.025 on social trust (Dinesen et al, 2020); and that globalisation has an effect size of -0.1 on public spending (Heimberger, 2020). According to these results, the effect of trust is considerably larger than that of ethnic diversity on social trust and equivalent to, or slightly smaller than, the effect of terror attacks on a range of attitudinal outcomes.…”

“…2 Blair et al (2021) identified just five in five leading 3 political science journals between 1999 and 2018 (e.g Lau et al, 1999), and just one of these used observational research. The use of meta-analyses has been increasing, with recent studies focusing on topics such as social trust and ethnic diversity (Dinesen et al, 2020), terrorism and political attitudes (Godefroidt, 2021), natural resources and conflict (Blair et al, 2021;O'Brochta, 2019), effects of political incivility (Van 't Riet & Van Stekelenburg, 2021), and gender and candidate choice (Schwarz & Coppock, 2021). Despite this, they are relatively sparse, often do not use observational data, and employ different analytical strategies.…”

“…This general model can be expanded by adding variables to explain the effect sizes, as in the standard regression format. Whilst four-level meta-analyses are not common, they are appropriate (Fernández-Castilla et al, 2020) and follow similar studies (Dinesen et al, 2020;Godefroidt, 2021;Heimberger, 2020). 9 Although I report results from fixed effects models in the Appendix, random effects models do not assume that there is a true value for all studies but instead vary between contexts, which is a more likely assumption given the diversity of studies.…”

An interpretation of meta-analytical evidence for the link between collective narcissism and conspiracy theories

“…Thus, we argue conspiracy theories and collective narcissism serve (both to politicians and their audiences) a common function to justify and perpetuate societal polarization and intergroup tensions between groups at different levels of social hierarchies and intergroup hostilities in the context of intergroup conflicts. They help create and perpetuate threatening environments where violence easily escalates and people rally around authoritarian leaders, preferring undemocratic to democratic governance [50] (at least in its representative and deliberative forms [51]).…”

UFOs: The Political Economy of Unidentified Threats

“…For example,Yam et al (2020) find that the rise of COVID-19 cases is associated with support for political leaders, using individual data from 11 countries.28 An exception isGodefroidt (2022) who makes a clear distinction.…”